


Isthmus

by AwfulLawful



Category: Megamind (2010)
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Cultural Differences, Alien Culture, Alien Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Multi, Other, Territorialism, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Voyeurism, X-ray Vision, before the movie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-12 03:25:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 57,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15330669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwfulLawful/pseuds/AwfulLawful
Summary: Eight day old infants aren't exactly going to have a coherent picture of their home world or culture if they are abruptly separated from it and grow up on another planet entirely - no matter HOW magnificent their minds are.  Thus, Megamind feels he can't be entirely at fault when he only now starts to piece together the ghosts of his past, and how it connects him to his enemy.  A Hero abuses his X-Ray Vision, sees something he shouldn't, and feels obligated to make amends; and triggers a domino effect of discovery that leaves the both reeling.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, I've been having thoughts on Megamind and the whole alien thing. The one-shot I wrote before was definitely fun but it made me feel like I'd missed a HUGE opportunity using the strangely vast wealth of reproductive knowledge I have. It seems to be a vice of mine to mess with reproduction.  
> After writing my Incubus fic for Harry Potter I began to think in terms of alternative ,uncommon, or alien gender possibilities once the 'three parents' aspect came up in the plotline. Basically my story stipulated that an Incubus/Succubus are only able to pass on magical power and provide no genetic link to their offspring whatsoever, thus they need both a female and a male mate to make a collective three-parent baby. This has a grain of truth to it per legend since a Succubus was said to steal sperm from a human man, change it somehow, and then implant that into a human woman as an Incubus to make a baby; one of which was Merlin himself. Aren't shape shifting sexually charged night-terrors neat?  
> With me so far?  
> This got me thinking about alien... Bits. And whether or not Megs and Roxanne would even fit. And what about Metro Man? Physiological Tetris would already be hard enough considering Metro Man's size. He is not a small man. In the bulge department he's pretty impressive and that man has absolutely no reason to wear a cup, so what we're looking at there is real. The Square-Peg-Round-Hole' problem in terms of alien/human interaction, which also carries over to alien/alien interaction if they evolved on different worlds seems pretty relevant in this fandom, doesn't it? Metro Man might not even be a very big male for his species. Hell; he was raised on entirely alien food. What if he's even significantly stunted in terms of growth? And is Megs, too?  
> These questions are driving me NUTS as I work on Megamind story concepts. So I settled on one of them and will examine the others later.  
> Gender.  
> I am so damned tired of either Roxanne or Metro Man being left out by writers (Megamind is popular, isn't he?) because they are of the two hearts forever type, which is fine, but pretty uncreative when dealing with aliens. In other words: human ideals of relationship and even physical dynamics no longer apply.  
> I hope you enjoy this this biological jigsaw puzzle when it all comes together.

Chapter 1 - The Right Wrong Person

"We're all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you've been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there's no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn't until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems—the ones that make you truly who you are—that we're ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you're looking for. You're looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: it's got to be the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, "This is the problem I want to have."

I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way."

~Andrew Boyd,  _Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe_

* * *

 

The only thing worse than being a hero with too much to do was being a hero with  _nothing_  to do during a time when you were  _supposed_  to have too much to do. It meant that, whether you liked it or not, your mind wandered.

At least if he had villains to chase at the moment he would have  _something_  to keep his mind off of wishing he could stop patrolling when there was nothing actually going on. But no; he was expected to be seen on his rounds or there would be someone calling the news to let everyone know their caped babysitter was missing and the metaphorical children would panic upon finding themselves alone for one evening. It had actually happened once before; around the winter holidays just after the citizens had grown confident in his vigilance when Wayne was just getting out of his teens. He had taken the calmness of the unusually crime-free evening to visit his parents without announcement and had shown up hours later to offer his assistance when the sound of a large-scale search assaulted him from the dinner table... only to discover they were searching for  _him_.

It had been an interesting evening to say the least. What did these people think could possibly happen to him, besides just getting bored and leaving them to their own ill-advised dependency? Maybe that was exactly the problem. What would happen to them if he left? Metro City hadn't exactly been a stellar example of metropolitan perfection before he started taking a more active role in stamping out crime (and honestly, a huge part of the problem was simple poverty - good thing he'd managed to convince the city they needed to play cause-and-effect on that one).

There seemed to be only three kinds of people in this world; those that feared him and misbehaved, those that loved him and behaved, and those that challenged him and kept him on his toes no matter what their moral alignment.

That last category was far too small for his liking. They were the category of people that treated him as close to a normal person as he had known outside of his parents. They didn't worship him or think of him as either a god sent to earth or a symbol of all that was good in the world; they snarked at him and maintained that being powerful didn't give him the right to be a jerk... and they were right.

So he kept going for the sake of being a living security blanket for the people of Metro City. No matter how much it galled him that this absurd chore was his lot in life.

This type of boring patrol was a very particular type of irritation for Metro Man. He yearned for the ability to be off-duty for even a  _few precious hours_. The power to  **stop** being Metro Man for a little while was the only power he didn't have, and lately would trade all of his existing powers for in a heartbeat. As a pre-teen he remembered sleeping in on Saturday morning or staying up late playing games or just having to sit in the dining room for an hour or two for dinner with his parents; something he had  _loathed_  and suffered through then but as a grown man would  _pay for_  if he could, especially while the nostalgic atmosphere of a decorated evergreen and the sparkling of garlands and the tinkling of bells were present in the manor as they were now.

But he couldn't do that without overly emotional chaos ensuing,  _damn it_ , and so he was patrolling for absolutely no reason precisely on schedule. Night after night, day after day, even when nothing was happening, just so that these insecure people could see him and feel safer for it the same way his parents used to leave the hallway light on when he went to sleep as a kid. Was that what he'd become? Metro City's security object? He groaned in irritation as he continued on despite these thoughts.

This was a type of tedium that was not only irritating in itself but was also occurring while he  _should have been able to relax_ , which was infinitely worse.

Finally, blessedly, the patrol was over and he had done it with sufficient languor to be sure he was spotted by enough people to give the city comfort. Though he didn't need to sleep often he still did it from time to time and it had been four days since his last nap. He craved the solitude of his underground lair, where he had a broadcast of white noise waiting to keep his brain from registering any commotion from the city across the water while he slept, at least until something serious enough justified the Mayor using the alarm system they had set up to wake him. Metro Man rarely got a few hours of sleep at a time when he chose to indulge in it. It was probably only habit, but it was a short break he had come to depend on for recharging his humanity tolerance.

And he rather hated that he was, after so long wishing he was just like everyone else, beginning to view them as a completely different species. He'd always known he wasn't one of them… but he'd never really felt it this strongly before.

Looking down now at the glistening white of Metro City, Metro Man paused and considered whether or not he really needed to rush home just yet; there was always a few more people to check up on that had more importance in his mind than the generally labelled 'citizen'. That third category was what kept him sane. Those precious few that looked him in the eye and didn't blush, who spoke to him like he was a normal part of their world, who told him off if they didn't want to hang on his every word; those were the people he looked after when patrolling was done.

Though he wasn't cold Metro Man blew out a puff of breath to see it make steam. Unless he was literally enveloped in lava (which made him feel pleasantly warm) or out in space (slightly cool), the latter of which had happened only a few times while knocking large meteors away from the Earth, Metro Man  _always_  felt the same consistent temperature. To him the seasons were merely a change of scenery and available local produce, aside from one important impact on his regular schedule that was always somehow connected to the temperature.

Megamind.

Though Metro Man normally didn't worry when Megamind was out and about no matter the season he  **did**  know that the little guy tended to slow down in cold weather. Minion did too, for that matter. One good snow and they wouldn't budge from wherever they happened to be at the time, prison or lair, until they had no choice, had a plot that just couldn't wait for better conditions, or it got warm enough to see pavement again without either mechanical or chemical intervention. Whether from the cold just being very uncomfortable to them or because it actually slowed them down in some physical way Metro Man wasn't sure, but it  _was_  clear; winter and Megamind didn't mix well. There seemed to be the same reaction to extremes of heat as well, when it was ever experienced here.

Metro Man had not missed the cosmic irony in that since the three of them had landed in  _Michigan_ , of all places, which was a state absolutely  _plagued_  by lake-effect snow. It was practically a rite of passage in this area to have accidentally uncovered the wrong car because you couldn't tell which one yours was when you started digging. Michigan bordered  _four_  of the five Great Lakes, and the two peninsulas of the state were geographically playing a constant game of "I'm-Not-Touching-You" at the boundary between two of them. In other words; barring everything above the Canadian border, Megamind couldn't possibly have landed in a more hilariously inconvenient climate for his biology while still remaining on the same continent.

For this reason winter was also Roxanne's seasonal vacation, since she was kidnapped with far less frequency and that allowed her time to have more of a regular social life. It wasn't unusual for Wayne to focus across town on blustery days and see her rosy-cheeked, wrapped up in scarves and mittens and other things that made her more attractive than usual, and drinking coffee with a few friends in the park making snow castles. She also made sand castles in the summer – it was an odd talent of hers but luckily Michigan was one place where you could do both pretty frequently. He'd dropped her off on her balcony enough times to know that she had some awards for them right where she kept her journalism awards. It was quirky things like that Wayne admired just as much as her intelligence and spunk.

Oh well. A friend was good. Not great, but it was better than nothing and she had made it clear she wasn't interested in anything intimate with him for reasons she had explained in… excruciating detail. The speech still rang in his head when he was annoyed with his current date for being infatuated with Metro Man and not Wayne Scott.

Just to be sure Megamind wasn't up to anything, Metro Man focused until he found her. Roxanne was sitting at her desk looking tired and worn-out and still working on something that was apparently on a deadline considering the time and the rapidity of her woodpecker-like typing. At this rate with the way the snow was coming in from over the lakes Metro Man knew she might get stuck in the building and be unable to get home until the plows went through. She had probably planned for that, though, as there was a mug of coffee sitting on her desk that was libel to keep her up well past midnight and a gym bag under her desk with a change of clothes and shower things in it. Considering her building actually contained a gym on the third floor complete with showers she was camping out for the night right where she was.

He sighed and considered going to visit her and maybe offer her a ride home, but no… she was usually only annoyed with him when he interrupted her in the middle of a flow. Roxanne would lose her train of thought, he would get lectured, and everyone would be worse off than they were now. It was best to keep away and let her alone. Besides; Roxanne being very much un-kidnapped didn't necessarily mean Megamind was behaving himself, it only meant that he might have decided to play with a different toy, unlikely as that seemed.

Maybe Megamind was building something instead, given that he'd be trapped in his lair for a while and was likely as aware of the oncoming storm as Roxanne was.

Metro Man knew where said lair was.  _Of course_ he knew where Megamind's lair was. All he had to do was close his eyes and listen, hone in on that all-too-familiar voice, and look in the direction of the strangely endearing cackle. Megamind had never even bothered to move it after he realized Metro Man knew where his home away from home was located, and that was for one very specific reason.

The rules of their game applied to both parties.

And after playing along for so many years Metro Man knew where the trade items were.

Metro Man couldn't just snatch Megamind up and cart him off to jail; they had an unspoken  _agreement_  on that front. Megamind wouldn't kidnap Roxanne or act up too badly while Metro Man was overseas handling big disasters he couldn't spare time on, and in return Metro Man didn't take Megamind back to jail after escape unless he'd actually done something to warrant it since his last escape. Megamind didn't actually hurt Roxanne or whatever random civilians had gotten mixed up in his schemes, and Metro Man didn't actually hurt Megamind or Minion. Metro Man didn't seriously think that last one was a possibility after the first year or so of their silly dance routine, neither one of them seemed up to it, but he'd always known the scorecard was being kept regardless. There was always an even trade… a balancing act that they had worked out through trial and error.

And in this case it meant that Metro Man was only allowed to _look_ , not  _touch_.

Metro Man NEVER invaded Megamind's lair. Visit him in prison - fine, take him out in battles - great, but the warehouse was sacred ground. Not only was it the one place where Megamind was able to call entirely his own but Minion lived there too. If nothing else Metro Man would have respected the boundary because of that last one, at least until Megamind did something equally unforgivable first; like kidnapping Roxanne when she was dangerously sick or injured… which Megs had never, ever done.

It was an admittedly helpful give-and-take thing that prevented the Warden from having to suffer any additional escape talleys (many of which relied on the fact that the idiot kept  _stealing Megamind's things_ ) and Roxanne got advanced warning in the form of disasters and inclement weather heralding when it was safe for her to stay home and have long baths in peace or go out with her friends undisturbed.

Normally the blue man would be tinkering with any one of thousands of little devices he had squirreled away in tight corners and nooks, scribbling plans and hanging papers in patterns designed intentionally to confuse anyone that might find them. Or doing something far more mundane. After all Megamind had the same needs as any other biological being and it was pretty common for Metro Man to 'look in' on him only to find him doing chores or watching television or putting away groceries or just plain sleeping. At first it was the last activity that seemed to be occupying him; Megamind was lying in bed curled up under a thick blanket with his face half-obscured by the veritable hoard of pillows he burrowed into when being outside of his prison cell allowed it. Megamind really was just sleeping, or so it seemed until he shifted in a way any mature adult on the planet would have recognized.

Was he..?

Metro Man coughed and turned away, a slight flush on his face. It wasn't that he was particularly surprised. Wayne had definitely given himself a hand every now and then. It was just weird to catch someone else doing it.

It was inevitable really. There were  **reasons**  he didn't use his x-ray vision frivolously and this was one of them. It was precisely the same reason he wished he had as much conscious control over his  _other_  powers of perception as he did over the x-ray. After all; despite all their mutual acceptance that theirs was a marriage of financial and social convenience there was ONE thing his parents had liked about each other while he was growing up and it was very much the cause of his insisting on moving out of the Manor at a relatively early age.

Being a kid with Super-Hearing in a home where the  _honeymoon never ended_  had been fucking  _unbearable_. If there hadn't been a reproductive issue with both of them then Wayne was absolutely certain he'd have been knee-deep in siblings by the time High School came around. Maybe that was one of the reasons his mother had insisted so strongly on so many doctors testing her son to see if he could reproduce with humans (a very emphatic NO on that one). She wanted him to have what she could only experience through adoption. Thankfully he had managed to convince her that adoption was good enough for him too, otherwise the tests never would have ended and she would still be miserable over it… though she still constantly asked when he was going to marry and adopt already.

Still, suspicion loomed as it always did with villains and Metro Man refocused quickly to see if another party was involved and whether or not they seemed glad to be there. But no – Megamind was alone and looking through him to the space below only revealed the sheets beneath his rhythmically shifting form.

Well… good for him. Prison probably wasn't the best place to do that, lack of privacy and all, and it made sense for Megamind to use his free time (metaphorically speaking) for that particular activity. A further look around the lair confirmed Minion was not there, likely doing the shopping in the holo-guise of a random woman he'd scanned with the holo-watch at some point, further illustrating that Megamind actually had some time to himself for once.

Abruptly Metro Man felt like a complete ass for intruding on that time even if Megamind would never know about it. He blinked rapidly and rubbed his eyes to refocus them on the perspective he  _should_ have been concentrating on; the city around him and not one particular villain that was trapped in place regardless of what he was doing. As little time as he had to himself - possibly an hour in a week when he was planning to stay awake for it and not just fucking sleep - Metro Man appreciated how difficult it must be for Megamind to have time of his own too.

Still; a quiet evening continued. The few issues he could see from his standpoint were nothing the people and police of Metro City couldn't handle by themselves, including one particularly hilarious failed assault he'd witnessed earlier featuring what he assumed was a planned rape and a comparatively tiny woman that turned out to kick all kinds of ass when threatened. The only intervention Metro Man might have considered was stopping her after the guy was clearly down, but luckily a nearby officer had heard her vicious tirade and she managed to calm the woman down and get her to explain what was going on.

Metro Man closed his eyes and prepared to go to his underground safe zone to sleep when his flight path took him over the warehouses again.

He'd stopped before he'd even realized it, mouth gaping as he spun in place and tried to figure out what the hell the source that wonderful taste in the air was. Thunderstruck, Metro Man took in an open-mouthed slow breath and nearly bent backward with how long he did so. The taste flowed over his tongue and made his mouth water and warmth swelled in his chest the same way it did when he walked down a snowy street on Christmas Eve and passed by a bakery in full production with the windows flung open wide due to the heat of the ovens within. It was actually a scent, not a taste, but it permeated the air so strongly it may as well have been liquid for how efficiently it stuck to the inside of his mouth. Elevated senses weren't often a good thing in such a smelly, polluted, and highly populated area… but it occasionally had its rewards.

"What is  _that_?" he asked aloud.

As he spun he found he couldn't pinpoint the source until he looked straight down, and realized he was hovering directly over Megamind's lair. Curiosity overcame his moral qualms about privacy and he focused again to see… Megamind still at his task.

That was odd. Why was it taking him so long?

The blue body was still buried in those pillows, enveloped in a veritable nest of them, balanced on his knees and shoulders while both of his hands were preoccupied elsewhere instead of merely providing his body support. Cursing himself already for it but unable to resist, Metro Man focused his x-ray vision to see what those hands were doing precisely. Before he had even focused halfway through he startled as he noticed two things.

One; Megamind's internal arrangement looked  _awfully_  familiar.

It was completely different from the way humans or even any animal on Earth looked when he x-rayed them. Perhaps he hadn't noticed before because Megamind had always been facing him when he'd scanned the smaller man for injuries or hidden weapons, but now that he was essentially looking through him starting with the smaller alien's back the similarities leapt out at Wayne like the light of an oncoming train in a tunnel.

Wayne had avoided X-raying himself until he was 20 out of the fear he would see irrefutable proof that he was in no way human. Yes he  _knew_ that already, but knowing and feeling were two different things and it took him a while to really accept what he was. If he had even a  _small hope_  that this was all some cosmic prank, that he was a human that had just been genetically altered somehow, or that he was simply a perfectly normal human being in a padded room somewhere hallucinating that he was an alien super-powered hero figure… he wanted to hold onto that. In his youth all he had wanted to be was normal, especially after he learned the hard way he had to control his powers very carefully playing any sort of sport with other children.

That hope was, of course, utterly demolished when he had given in to curiosity and seen with his own eyes that his resemblance to the species he had been adopted into was literally only skin-deep. He didn't even have names for the organs he had because they didn't resemble anything he knew about human biology. After a while fretting over it he had eventually accepted this drastic difference, and had expected the same from Megamind since he was an alien too. But even after all of that not ONCE had it occurred to Wayne to compare and contrast his own interior arrangement with that of Megamind, because they were obviously different peoples from the outside… and cursed himself for it now because he had failed to recognize the similarities simply because he was usually looking at the same puzzle backwards, or mirrored, from how he viewed himself. Looking down at himself with X-ray gave him a  _flipped perspective_  than the one he would have gotten looking at himself head-on as if through a mirror.

Their innards were practically  _identical_. The most obvious difference that he could tell now was size. Metro Man's organs were simply larger and bulkier because they had more room to occupy whereas Megamind's were smaller and constrained by the slender body they had developed for. Metro Man had honestly seen precisely the same effect between adult male humans that simply had different body types and frames; they were THAT similar. The other difference, one that struck Metro Man like a bolt of lightning, were the organs clearly meant for reproduction.

Megamind still very much had a penis, or at least something  _like_ a penis because he clearly had no testicles to fuel it, at least not  _externally_ which was one feature Metro Man did possess like humans did. It was smaller than Metro Man's own though matched his frame well enough, but again similarly  _shaped_  - the head was much wider than a human's was and with a deeper angle at the tip, caused by the actual bone that ran the length of it called a baculum (that had been an interesting conversation with his doctor when he was fourteen) complete with the oddly ridged texture of the tip itself.

Most mammals had a penile bone actually, even primates, with humans being an odd exception, so the Scott family doctor had waved it off as perfectly normal for Wayne's body and nothing to worry about. That bone was usually there because engorgement was meant to occur  _after_ penetration for the species, not  _before_  like it was for humans, and would allow those mating to achieve whatever the desired result of that was. The main two reasons for this were that either the species needed to mate in one hell of a hurry and just get it over with… or they would essentially lock together once the penis had reached maximum size and they'd be unable to separate for a while in a copulatory tie.

Considering the head of Wayne's oddly-shaped cock got much wider when engorged with a pronounced ridge between head and shaft, he was a notorious cuddler so long as his current girlfriend didn't mind his staying embedded for a while, and he seemed to be at his firmest  _after orgasm_ it left him with little doubt as to what that indicated. Wayne hated it when the women he dated considered merely climaxing the end of sex. They'd leave to clean up and he would pout because, even though he'd come, he didn't feel finished unless he'd softened inside her first; which could sometimes take quite a while. More than once he'd lamented how resilient the human female's bits were in terms of stretching, because it was never very difficult for her to just pull away from him without any more resistance than she would experience if the man was simply wider than normal, and Wayne kept instinctively waiting for her to 'catch' on that ridge. Even though he knew, logically, that it was stupid; he always felt personally insulted somehow when that locking in didn't happen.

Megamind had all of the same external features simply on a smaller scale - but again to a scale that matched his frame - without the external testes. Once he focused on the interior, however, Megamind stopped resembling Metro Man whatsoever.

Megamind's internal sexual configuration was, simply, just  _weird_.

Clearly Megamind didn't have a typical male arrangement inside even in comparison to Metro Man's, which matched him in most every other respect. There was still, clearly, no direct relation to a female arrangement either, aside from an obvious tunnel that began just where a scrotum would normally be in any male. This tunnel led up to a gathering of glands that were currently heated and pumping different fluids into a central chamber… that were connected to the blue alien's cock via a small tube. In the midst of that bundle of glands were two bulbs that looked as if they might be very deeply internal testes. Given the tendon and muscle structure around it that central chamber was meant to contract and push the contents out through the penis just like normal ejaculate… so what the heck was that tunnel for?

Metro Man focused on the fluids themselves, the enzymes that were gathering in that central chamber, and saw nothing remotely resembling eggs or semen - not even the inert amoeboid semen that Metro Man himself possessed. It was all just… fluid. Nothing more or less than different liquids mixing together, doing nothing more than swirling and combining in there.

...what the hell? If he'd been a biologist he was sure this would be utterly fascinating, but as he was not a biologist all it meant was a lot of confusion and curiosity.

The  _second_  thing that startled him was noticing, just from focusing in that direction and breathing in,l what the source of that intoxicating taste in the air was. It was  _Megamind_ , and the more the blue body writhed and shook as climax approached, the stronger that scent and taste became as those fluids gathered and mixed, and the more Metro Man's mouth watered in reaction to it.

Confused, amazed, and intrigued as hell, Metro Man left his high vantage point and drifted down until he was just outside the building with nothing more than a few feet of air and a brick wall between him and the other alien.

It was wicked. Metro Man knew that before he even moved to a better vantage point. But he did it anyway and he fully acknowledged that he was doing something wicked and didn't care. His darker urges had very seldom won out against the moral fiber his mother had gone to such great lengths to instill in him. Now it did – with a force that left some voice in the back of the hero's mind screaming for him to go to a time-out. He ignored it as fiercely as he was able and kept his eyes and all available senses focused right where they wanted to be.

The  _outside_  of Megamind, who looked marvelous in that position; vulnerable and flushed and a little bit frantic while he gripped and tugged at his cock  _exactly the same way Wayne did_  - grasping the length and firmly yanking upward under the ridge of the head to simulate being locked inside another body. Something Metro Man didn't expect, though, was the other hand pressing and rubbing at the entrance of that tunnel, which he had only just noticed was blocked from the outside by a layer of skin that looked no different from the blue surrounding it.

Did Megamind even  _know_  there was an opening beyond that spot? Or was he only pressing on that area because he had discovered, through trial-and-error, it felt good to do it? Either way the scent and the image was arousing as nothing else Wayne had experienced before and he felt himself swell a little in response to it; but that very irritating subtle swell that was waiting for him to be encased in someone before the actual engorgement would happen. Even all that blue skin and the strange, slender body, and even that big blue head (purple in some places as the flush spread) made him shake with lust just watching.

The moment finally came when Megamind tensed and cried out with no warning while those gathering fluids burst forth in short spurts, and Metro Man  _must_  have made a noise in reaction to that surprise because Megamind  _heard him_. The sound of pleasure that the blue alien had made was swiftly followed by a yelp of pain when Metro Man's careless exclamation startled him and caused his body to jolt in reaction - resulting in the two fingers that had already been firmly rubbing the thin barrier to that tunnel to push  _far_  too hard.

As it had done many times before the scent of Megamind's blood assaulted Metro Man's senses; and this time it had certainly not been a normal result of a battle. Horror leapt up the larger male's chest and choked him so badly he almost fell out of the air, though he managed to catch himself and merely reel backward instead. Pale, mind numb with shock over what had just occurred, Wayne backed off a dozen yards or so and watched to see what would happen now.

Clearly that patch of skin was  _meant_  to break away. There was a  _tunnel behind it_ , for pity's sake!  _Something_  was meant to go in there. But did Megamind know that? Or was this exactly what it looked like: an alien residing in an alien world who had no idea how their own body worked due to having none of their own kind to teach them?

Megamind went still and gasped as the aftershocks of climax continued to pulse through him despite the pain. When they eventually ebbed he took a few deep breaths and brought his hands back up toward his face to look at them. A moment of panicked silence was broken as he swore and made a small, distressed noise in his throat.

Metro Man reeled and winced. He couldn't remember the noise he had made to startle Megamind; he only knew it had been loud enough to make the window nearby rattle audibly. He sincerely doubted it had contained any words. He remembered being told he was prone to growling when he was young, something his parents had trained out of him like it had been a speech impediment. Had he growled? That would have been enough to scare  _anyone_  into accidentally hurting themselves no matter what they had been doing at the time! This was entirely his fault and inexcusable and he'd have to do  _something_ about it. If not now, then after the little guy calmed down.

Metro Man swallowed and took a calming breath himself before he managed to focus his x-ray again and be sure Megamind wasn't truly injured. Thankfully he wasn't - the patch of flesh had been badly torn but hadn't been displaced. It might even heal shut again given time. Still, there was something heart-wrenching about it when Megamind gathered a portion of his blanket and pressed it to the wound to staunch the bleeding… clearly unaware that it was only a minor injury if the elevated heart rate and continued trembling was any indication.

Damn,  _damn, **damn**_  what had he just done?


	2. Red Letter Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before anyone asks – no this is not one of those 'Megamind turns out to be female' stories. I have no real issue with genderflip per se but it seems like it's never done quite to my satisfaction as far as the reverse-domino effect that would have on the story as a whole.  
> For example: If Megamind is female from birth, how the hell would the Warden get away with raising a little girl in a men's institution? From a biological standpoint, how would that affect her relationship with Roxanne? Or even interacting with Metro Boy in school? Unless you start the story from Megamind's arrival on Earth and change everything from there onward you are entirely basing your story on the premise of a female character behaving exactly like a male would, as well as every other character reacting to said events as if that character was male, up until some magical universal 'Megamind=female now' transfer switch is flipped for your story to be remotely feasible. It just doesn't work that way; and I didn't get into fanfiction to rewrite entire books and movies right from the introduction.  
> ...okay maybe ONCE but I started at the end of The Hobbit and completely derailed The Lord of the Rings. It was still the end of a story, just not the big story.  
> You can apply the above complaint to all sources of fanfiction, ESPECIALLY Harry Potter.  
> Again, nothing is really wrong with the overall concept, but I have very rarely if ever seen it done in a way that didn't make the story feel like the psychological equivalent of patchwork quilting - nothing really matches up but it's at least been arranged in a pretty pattern that pleases the eye. I firmly believe on matching up my seams and colors if at all possible; quilting or not.  
> So - no. The Megamind I have invented here is not female. Nor entirely male. Alien genders need not be binary!

Chapter 2: Red Letter Day

"Could it be that I commit my crimes for reasons OTHER than monetary gain? Could it be that I derive pleasure from passing my time in challenges of wit and skill? Could it be that the crime of murder is too mundane, too artless, to satisfy my needs? Could it be that I actually RESPECT The Batman and LOOK FORWARD to our periodic tests? Of COURSE it could. And were I to KILL The Batman - red-letter day aside ... the rest of my days could well be blank boxes." ~Calendar Man

* * *

 

Megamind sat at his workstation dejectedly and glowered.

Minion called it  _pouting_  but it was clearly  _glowering_  since Masters of Villainy did NOT do anything as crass as pouting. There was a difference in definition and everything! And anyway Minion had entirely the wrong angle to be able to tell. Megamind was glowering at the  _paper_ , not  _Minion_ , so the fish just wasn't getting the full glowering effect from his vantage point. If Megamind had looked up at Minion it would have been obvious that there was no childish pouting involved whatsoever, he just didn't feel like looking up to demonstrate it, so  _there_.

Megamind had been staring at the vellum paper for an hour and no urge to actually make a mark on it had appeared. This was odd since he had all sorts of ideas going through his magnificent mind at the moment concerning evil plots that were sure to succeed. Unfortunately all of them involved very much the usual amount of physical activity that every other plan of his involved; lots. At the moment Megamind just wasn't up to lots of physical activity. And that was just annoying, especially since he'd even made an effort to go out into the damnable winter his foster world suffered from as part of the seasonal change. Curse this insufferable icy inconvenience!

Every. Single. Year! Megamind swore every December that if his two favorite playthings didn't live in this climate he wouldn't bother with Metrocity at all! There had to be better places to set up camp. Oh well. Metro Man wouldn't leave unless he was desperately needed in another location, nobody else would be nearly as much fun to kidnap as Miss Ritchi, and relocating Miss Ritchi by force was as likely to succeed as trying to fight the snowstorms by shooting at them-

THERE was an idea.

*scribble scribble*

...sigh.

Megamind lay his head on the tabletop and rested his neck while he went over the events of the previous day and continued up until this point in time. Though he seldom admitted such things even in the face of irrefutable evidence (on the grounds that a mistake you learned from was never, ultimately, a mistake) Megamind had to accept he was an  ** _idiot_** for continuing with his kidnapping plans this morning without taking into account the, er… unfortunate event of the last evening.

The battle, glorious learning experience though it had been, had proven inadvisable at best in his current condition. It had been such a  _good plan_ , though! It couldn't have waited for clearer weather or recovery time for such a little problem! Though Megamind supposed he should have at least fixed the temperature regulator for the tank in Minion's suit before they left… he thought the fish might have caught a chill. Minion hadn't said anything though and participated with his usual cheer and helpfulness. Megamind would be sure to get him a treat. Perhaps some feeder fish to hunt in the bigger tank.

Yes, that sounded like a good idea.

Megamind scribbled that little note down as well and abruptly lost his urge to write anything yet again. He should really get up and do something about his predicament other than pou-  _glower_ about it. Even the chair was uncomfortable, and considering this was one of the more heavily padded ones in the lair he was just going to have to bear it lest Minion notice something was amiss. It was all his own fault, too, for not having better control over his own basic motor functions… but once again every time Megamind got into that sexually charged state his mind seemed to surrender to a pleasantly blank haze of sensation. It was almost as if his body was  **designed**  to make him lose control of his higher cognitive functions during sex! Even if he was only doing it to himself!

Not  _impossible_  as an intentional biological feature... but  _unlikely_ since it seemed an unwise evolutionary tactic at best. What if he was  _attacked_  while all that was going on!? There wouldn't be any defense! Hell even creatures on  _this_  planet used mid-coital ambush as a tactic to weed out their rivals. It made them horrible, horrible assholes but it was still effective as a strategy so they did it anyway. All's fair in love and war, and sometimes they were precisely the same thing.

He erased the doodle of Minion's first mechanical body that he'd been fussing with earlier and sat back in his chair to stretch out his arms and legs after sitting for far too long, then regretted it.

…..OW.

Megamind tensed with unexpected pain that only increased in intensity when the jolt increased the pain and thus made him tense harder on reflex. This was annoying. If it hadn't been for that damned noise!

Megamind didn't even remember what it had sounded like, really, and that worried him because he remembered EVERYTHING. Literally. But the sound itself just hadn't registered in his mind as much as how it made him  **feel**. His awareness of the entire world had screamed "DANGER!" at him so fiercely he'd carelessly hurt himself and not even realized it until his orgasm had passed. Before the motor control portion of his brain could switch from 'that's fantastic' to 'ow, stop' he had focused on something else entirely; trying to identify the threat, and he couldn't focus on absolutely anything else until it had been calm and quiet long enough to satisfy that urge.

Once the main spasms were over the injury was only realized by examining his hands and discovering three things; a small patch of purpling skin stuck under his fingernails, a lot of red around it, and a worrying amount of clear fluid… which was continuing to emerge from the injury with every aftershock in small bursts.

He mentally berated himself for it every moment since it had occurred, but everyone was allowed one slip-up of common sense every now again right? What idiot managed to injure themselves while masturbating? That was the sort of thing you heard stories about but never expected any rational person to ever manage themselves... barring faulty implements that legitimately failed their intended function while being used, which was just a horrifying thought and prompted mental images that made him wince. Ew.

Still, it hadn't exactly been expected, had it? He hadn't had to worry about sudden noises freezing him since… oh. Years ago.

Metro Boy used to growl when they had attended school together. It had not been a pleasant experience to say the least. It had made Megamind a skittish bundle of nerves every time, even though it had never been directly intended for him. Block tower fell down? Growl. Broke the hundredth crayon of the day? Growl. Snapped a guitar string? Big nasty growl. The teacher and classmates would treat Metro Boy like a frustrated puppy when it happened because that noise was really the only consequence. The boy hero had never struck anyone, or shouted, or went on destructive rampages. It was as if he felt the frustrated rumble was capable of neatly communicating everything he needed to say.

Nobody ever noticed Megamind clutching Minion's orb and huddling down like a startled mouse because they had been paying too much attention to their favored alien; the one that looked more like them and had rich parents and could take them flying. Even as a child Megamind had wondered about this reaction. He couldn't seem to help recoiling. It was like when someone tapped your knee with a hammer and it made your leg pop up like it was on a spring. His assumption had been that their species' had interacted (how hard would it be for Metro Man to go planet-hopping with those powers, honestly?) and it hadn't ended well for his own kind; thus the response. Given the differences between what Megamind could hear and human hearing it was likely no one else heard that growl the same way he did, though. To Megamind, Metro Boy's vocal tantrums had made his eyes rattle in their sockets. To the Teacher and Metro Boy's little flunkies he might have actually sounded like a puppy for all Megamind knew. They apparently found the super powered tyke's tantrums adorable, likeable even.

That instantly alert nervousness Metro Boy's growls had once caused was NOTHING compared to the heart-freezing terror he'd experienced the day before, though. Still, it had been a similar effect. Perhaps he should investigate that. Metro Man didn't growl; he seemed to have grown out of it. So what had it  _been_?

It must have been a resonance thing… Megamind knew that certain frequencies, such as 19 Hertz, triggered a fear reaction in humans. Automatically. They couldn't help it. It was likely instinctive because certain natural sounds, a tiger growl for example, had exactly that resonance and any developing proto-humans would have evolved to instinctively fear that noise and vibration… because it heralded the approach of a predator that would munch on your bones like so many pretzels. It made perfect sense because that fear response would give your body a hair-trigger on the eponymous fight or flight reflex and increase the chances of escape, thus survival.

Whatever that sound had been it must have simply, coincidentally, matched a natural resonance reaction that Megamind's own people had evolved for similar reasons, likely interaction with Metro Man's people. He already knew that certain noises were amplified for him due to the size and internal makeup of his head. Not all of his magnificent cranium was composed of brain - there were empty pockets in his head around his auditory canals, and the canals themselves were much larger than that of humans, so it made sense that noises affected him differently.

In the years he had been on earth there had been several causes for that fear reaction. It had happened a few times during particularly violent thunderstorms and the rumbling heavens made the whole building shake. On another occasion it was due to the pipe organ in an old church he was using as a site for a caper. The pipes vibrating in reaction to all of his surround sound equipment (background music is essential, after all) had triggered his body's danger alarm just enough to make him accidentally pronounce Metro City correctly when he stuttered in the middle of what was usually a single word for him. The shocked stare he had gotten from his nemesis and victim had almost been worth it.

Today, though, the fight had very definitely NOT been worth it. The strain of participating in it via all the usual runny-jumpy-climby stuff that battles involved had strained his injury significantly. And as embarrassing as the placement and cause of it was Megamind was reluctant to talk about it. The area between his legs had been actively bleeding by the time he had returned to his lair amazingly un-captured, which was actually frightening for a while because it made Megamind wonder what had been so important that it had pulled Metro Man away long enough to allow it. Megamind was certain Roxanne had been rescued, but after Metro Man flew away with her the hero had just seemed to lose interest in chasing his nemesis. It was almost insulting… but served his purposes today.

He took a deep breath and swallowed and tried to stay calm. The whole area felt hot and itchy and uncomfortable, and upon inspection with a mirror in the bathroom Megamind could tell the skin was NOT healing! It was drying and curling back and only exacerbating the problem, and that was only where his recent activities hadn't torn it still further. It didn't seem to be festering, which was a small miracle, but it certainly wasn't getting better either. After all that exertion the hole had actually gotten much bigger.

There was nothing beyond that Megamind had the courage to examine because it would require using a light and actually inspecting what bits of his insides that he had exposed, and he was afraid of what he would find there. Since he had discovered as a teenager that it felt good to press there the blue skinned alien assumed that his testicles were simply internal since he clearly had none on the outside. It was the only explanation he had for it and wasn't keen on investigating much further. It wasn't as if he could ask anyone else for answers about his body; there simply weren't any people that could offer him information without running painful and humiliating tests that Megamind was certainly not going to submit himself to enduring for the sake of mere curiosity.

Still; he had always healed before! At roughly four times the speed humans did, for that matter! So why wasn't  _this_  healing? It wasn't normal for his skin to just pull apart like that rather than mend. There must be a reason why he wasn't healing. Unfortunately the first thought Megamind had on that subject was that he had damaged himself in a way that his body wasn't able to compensate for.

NOW maybe he should swallow his pride and see the doctor at the prison by surrendering willingly? Or perhaps seek out treatment from another source, since this was likely beyond a simple prison physician's ability? Maybe someone that had dealings with aliens… but would they bother to treat a villain if such a person even existed? After all, the only other alien Megamind knew of hadn't likely needed any sort of medical care whatsoever. If Metro Man had needed a doctor at some point the cause of it certainly hadn't been one of the battles Megamind had participated in.

Megamind lifted his head off the desk and groaned, scowled at the paper that had stuck to his forehead and ripped it off, then continued ripping until the meaningless blueprint destruction made him feel better.

A concerned, "Sir, are you still pouting?" came from the kitchen area. Minion had noticed something was wrong and was going out of his way and doing his fishy best to cheer up his ward and boss. The smell of colorful confectionery wasn't doing it so much as knowing Minion was making the effort.

"NO, Minion. It is called glowering!" he retorted dryly, unable to summon much venom in his tone.

"I don't understand why you're glowering anyway. We won today!"

"I didn't win. I just escaped," Megamind hissed, too irritated to gloat. "There's a difference."

When Minion didn't continue the conversation Megamind put his head back down on the table. Now he'd given himself away. When did he ever pass up the opportunity to claim a victory? Minion wasn't going to let this go now, not until he'd poked at Megamind until he fessed up.

Oh, fuck it; he was pouting. At least it was for a good reason, though.

An open wound like this could be disastrous if it became infected, and it already felt feverish. A normal hospital was pointless. They wouldn't know what to do with an alien, would almost instantly call the police, and anyway they were notoriously centers of gossip and some chatty intern would inform the press of his presence faster than even the police would know about it. No… that would ruin his reputation as the #1 villain of Metrocity, one he had fought so long to achieve, and it was worth waiting a little while longer to see how things developed. If the wound got out of hand he could always ask Minion to take a look, humiliating as that thought was.

Megamind took another deep breath and he stood to pace so he could think to the steady beat of footfalls only to freeze in place and remember he was supposed to be taking shorter steps.

Urgh. Maybe he should just go back to bed and hope he felt better in the morning.

"The cookies are almost done, Sir," Minion called cheerfully from the back. "Do you want some tea with them?"

After cookies. He would go to bed after cookies.

Although... Megamind was sorely tempted to attempt duplicating that sound somehow, just to see if he could figure out what made it through association… so he could locate the original source and DE-BILITATE it to prevent this sort of thing happening again.

Yes, that was a  _much_  better idea, he thought, smiling and gripping his DE-GUN fondly.

* * *

 

Metro Man sat on the roof of the abandoned observatory and fretted.

He was watching Megamind from there and had been for a while now. The observatory gave him an amazingly unobscured view. After realizing how good of a view it really was Metro Man was amazed Megamind hadn't used the observatory for one of his plots yet since he wouldn't even have had to leave his warehouse to keep track of things, but maybe that was because it would have been too close to his hideout for comfort and drawn unwanted attention. Mobs had once been a common occurrence in Metro City before they had a hero to calm their constant, though justified, paranoia.

Even Metro Man found that prospect unacceptable and it was one of the main reasons he had never told anyone where Megamind's lair was. Megamind didn't deserve a good portion of the ire he got from the people of Metro City and inciting a lynch mob when he was, well, ineffectual evil… was a bit much. Roxanne had realized it years ago, and Metro Man hadn't been far behind, that Megamind had absolutely perfected the art of murderless mayhem, and he had done it on purpose. It had never been about Metro City - it had always been about the game. As long as Megamind kept it that way and the other villains, the really nasty ones, continued to take a backseat to the general theatrics… all the better. Metro Man didn't mind playing that game. It was boring and tedious, but something he could deal with so long as it continued to reduce the other types of criminal activity.

And it was  _essential_  that he keep this city safe. He'd known it since he was a child.

A scream alerted the hero to yet another issue he had to deal with and he left to do so, coming back fifteen minutes later. He had been flitting back and forth between his hero gig and keeping tabs on the other alien for a while now. By then Megamind was doodling on his planning paper and eating the frosted gingerbread Minion had been making since their return from this morning's caper. Metro Man sat and watched and continued to stall.

He WOULD have to go over there and try to start a conversation eventually. The problem was how to do that without starting a scuffle, because he really didn't think Megamind was up to that just now, and how to broach the actual subject he needed to talk about. How exactly does one casually mention they noticed you had an embarrassing injury? Wayne winced, imagining it. No matter how he began the speech kept starting with, "So I was watching you masturbate-" and just got worse from there. Yeah. THAT would not go over well.

But he had to do  _something_.

Normally Megamind would pace while he thought but had stood silently panicking in one spot after returning from the escape Wayne had allowed him, which was somehow worse to watch than the usual pacing would have been. Megamind was clearly in pain - and an idiot for going ahead with the fight anyway - and Metro Man had resisted x-raying him again for fear of what he might find and guilt over that being the cause of this whole thing anyway. Now he wondered if he might not have a choice in the matter. Toward the end of the fight Metro Man could smell Megamind's blood again and had little doubt as to what the cause was, with all the running and climbing the little guy was doing trying to eke out some semblance of victory. It all ended the same way, though; Megamind fought, Metro Man beat him, Roxanne was rescued while her snark knight commentary made the crowd cheer. The same old routine.

Then Wayne had made the decision that he didn't want to have this particular conversation while under guard, in the prison, while Megamind had to deal with the Warden's presence during what was sure to be a humiliating conversation with all that surveillance and being handcuffed to the chair he was sitting in. So he'd taken his sweet time getting Roxanne settled while she asked him why he was deliberately letting Megamind get away and Metro Man told her to stop being nosy. He should have known better because now she was just interested.

Now that Wayne thought about it there was one excuse he could think of for stopping by Megamind's lair, and how to bring up the subject, if he just bent the truth a little. But it would require he know the current condition of the injury he'd caused.

Oh well. In for an inch, in for a mile, he supposed. As long as he didn't outright lie.

Focusing his x-ray on the blue body again, Metro Man grunted a little sympathetically. The tear had gotten bigger; it was twice as big as it had been yesterday and now ran almost the entire length of that membrane, as well as further, smaller tears spidering out from the middle. Yeah, that thing wasn't going to heal. It clearly wanted to be open and, upon focusing down further to a cellular level, there was a clear divide between the healthy cells around it and the membrane itself. They were two different structures to the point where the remaining bits of that membrane might just pull off like a the plastic seal on a container. Hell, the membrane might have all come off in one uniform piece when healthy.

Just now, though, the skin there was hanging on for all it was worth despite simply not having the healing capabilities of the flesh it was attached to; it was drying out because the blood flow had been reduced, presumably triggered by the damage, as if the blue body had simply given up on it and had signed a sort of biological eviction notice. Wayne guessed that little built-in tourniquet trick was meant to prevent any infection or festering from that disposable bit of skin getting into the structure around it, and that was a really cool feature if you didn't think too hard about it evolving because at some point that trick had been  _necessary_.

It was still clearly attached, though, and enough blood was present to make it look terrible as the tearing continued to spread, and poor Megs HAD to be feeling it. Wayne Scott, Metro Man, had never felt physical pain. But he did know the extent of emotional turmoil it took to affect the way he moved and how he carried himself and how much was needed to make him wince. He couldn't imagine feeling that  _physically_. It must have been hell.

The tunnel beyond didn't appear to be damaged in any way nor did anything else in the blue body aside from the usual cuts and bruises typical of a post-battle Megamind. Aside from the obvious, he was perfectly healthy. Good.

Metro Man was forced to refocus when Megamind abruptly stood and started doing odd things. First Megamind did a sort of scan on his own head and ticked away on his computer to analyze the results, then he started putting something together. Wayne glanced curiously at the paper the villain had been sketching on, remembered it was all Greek to him aside from little pictures he could recognize like screws and metal sheets, and watched the inventor himself for clues. It took very little time to put together, actually. The device was a simple speaker as far as he could tell, though it had a lot of strangely shaped empty spaces inside it. The sound it initially made was pretty cute, really, like an aggressive purr. If babies growled it would sound like that, he was sure.

Minion poked his head… bowl… whatever out from the kitchen area and brought out another plate of cookies. "That sounds familiar, sir."

Megamind nodded and swallowed. Why did he look so nervous? "It's as close as I could get to the sound my worthy adversary used to make as a tiny titan in shool. Remember that little growl? That sadly spoiled socialite used it as a way of expressing ire over every little thing that didn't go his way, never noticing how it affected  _me_."

Metro Man sat up and watched with interest. He didn't actually remember doing it in school when Megamind was there. He thought he would have stopped by then.

Minion frowned. "Yeah. Lucky you were already in the corner most times or you might have jumped back into another student and just gotten into even more trouble. Why are you bringing it up, though?"

"Because, Minion, I'm tired of falling prey to that auditory affliction that assails me from time to time. Remember the pipe organ incident? And the spring storms? I believe that there is a resonance at play here - a biological alarm system that my people evolved for a reason. Perhaps in response to seismic activity or predators." Megamind fiddled with the dials and made the sound a bit louder and a little bit deeper. Though his hands had begun to shake unsteadily Megamind seemed pleased with the effect. "I am going to create a mechanization that tracks down things that may cause that particular resonance and destroy it!"

Metro Man raised a brow. He wondered if Megamind was going to recognize the main problem with that before actually trying it.

Minion bobbed side to side in his tank in a considering way. "Sir, someone will eventually order a new pipe organ, and you can't control the weather; Lady Doppler has dibs and you have to obey the villain code unless you plan to kill her; those are the rules. Anything else that makes a similar sound would probably be mechanical and used for something important. You're basically burning all the spinning wheels in the kingdom and just hoping everyone will have their thread and fabric imported instead of just replacing the spinning wheels."

Megamind crossed his arms and gave his cohort an analyzing look. "Spinning wheels?"

"I may have been watching the Disney Channel, sir."

"That doesn't sound very evil. Are you at least stealing the cable?"

"Oh, of course!" Minion smiled.

Megamind sighed and stared at the speaker. "Well, what do you suggest I do, Minion?"

The fish held out his tray and put it down when they were waved away. "Well, Sir, will you at least tell me why you need to do anything at all?"

Megamind grunted and muttered something Metro Man couldn't hear, then sighed. "Something happened yesterday that triggered that response. I don't know what made the noise but I felt like the world would end if I didn't stay still and figure out what the threat was. I've never been that scared before. Not since the first time I was falling in the middle of a caper and wasn't certain yet if Metro Man would bother to catch me."

Metro Man winced and clenched his fists.

Megamind continued. "So I need to find out what made that noise and get rid of it, or at least change it somehow to that it can't make that sound again. And I can't do that until I duplicate the noise so I know what to scan for… then the brain-bots can find the source."

Minion nodded, or more accurately bobbed in his bowl. "Alright. How can I help?"

"You can stay here and turn off the simulator once it reaches the right frequency," Megamind said simply.

Confused, Minion tilted sideways in the water. "Why can't you do that, Sir?"

Megamind swallowed. "Because once it hits the right frequency it is very likely I won't be able to move anymore."

Metro Man was torn between wanting to go in there now and explain himself, or waiting to see what his growl sounded like from an outside perspective. As it turned out he didn't have much time to wonder about it at all because Megamind's clever fingers found the frequency almost instantly - presumably that was the purpose of scanning his own head. He'd been trying to figure out what noises would reverberate in the cavities.

Megamind dropped like he'd been deactivated. Minion forgot his duty to turn off the device momentarily in his panic while he tried to revive his ward.

And Metro Man attacked on reflex.

An instant after the thing had begun that deep rumbling it was encased in two super-powered fists and crushed. Metro Man didn't know why he wanted so badly to destroy the thing, he just did, and he knew it was hurting Megamind.

Seconds passed while Metro Man panted and tried to contain the irrational urge to further crush the bits of machinery still in his hands. Minion gaped and lifted one metal finger as if he was going to speak but couldn't find the words, and Megamind-

Megamind lay so still it would have been easy to mistake him for a holographic image put there to distract. He had even stopped  _breathing_. It wasn't until Metro Man drifted toward him that the villain broke and scrabbled back with only three limbs; the fourth reaching for his DE-GUN.

Metro Man shook his head, not knowing why he had bothered. "Put it down," he ordered, disturbed by Megamind's behavior. It just wasn't  _normal_. "You know that thing doesn't work on me anyway."

Megamind either didn't hear or care because he kept at it, crying out when he finally hit a solid surface with his back and shakily fussing with the setting wheel on his weapon.

"You've already tried  _all of them_ , Megamind," the hero reasoned. "Please, just calm down." He hoped that he could get a reasonable conversation out of the other alien, but conciliating him enough to do that always seemed like such an insane chore. And it wasn't terribly likely to be easy after Metro Man had stormed in and smashed something because… actually he didn't know that last part. "Listen, we need to tal-"

Megamind ignored him and fired.

The blast hit him like a bolt of lightning. Metro Man wasn't hurt in the slightest, predictably, though he found his hair suddenly standing on end and both heard and felt his body crackling with an insistent blue static. At this point the hero intended to ask what the purpose in even trying that particular gun was when all previous experience proved it wouldn't work. Megamind had hit his enemy with every setting; DE-STROY, DE-HYDRATE, DE-COMPRESS, DE-MORALIZE, DE-BILITATE, DE-ATH RAY, DE-REGULATE… none of them had been even remotely effective. How many more settings could there possibly be? It wasn't even that big of a wheel.

Metro Man's inquiry died on his lips, though, when something occurred that the hero wouldn't have been able to predict even if he'd had years in which to make a list of all the cartoony slapstick bullshit things for that gun to do.

A short instant after that crackling beam hit him,with a great WHOOSH that had absolutely  _no right_ to sound like a hoard of angry pigeons taking flight, every single solitary bit of loose hanging paper in Megamind's lair leapt toward Metro Man. As this was quite a considerable amount of paper given the blue man's planning methods it wasn't long before the hero was enveloped in it. Metro Man startled and tried to at least bat them away from his face, but all that did was help the pieces his hands contacted stick there instead, eventually giving off the impression that he was wearing over-sized paper mache boxing gloves. By the time this weird function of the DE-GUN was complete Metro Man was absolutely coated in the stuff.

This was an odd but amazingly effective method of slowing Metro Man down for two major reasons.

First, he wasn't about to use his laser vision to cut through the paper when he couldn't see what he was aiming at. Megamind knew damned well that his nemesis couldn't use his X-ray vision to see through his own eyelids, and that they would close on reflex when suddenly covered in anything, clingy paper bits included. Using his lasers without guidance ran the risk of hurting someone and he just wasn't going to do that. Flailing about trying to catch someone he couldn't see was dangerous for the same reason, only relevant to controlling his strength instead.

Second, Metro Man had a hard time focusing his super hearing properly immediately after a loud noise threw off his internal volume dial. One of the main drawbacks of super hearing was that it made loud noises proportionally LOUDER; and essentially stunted his ability to hear quiet things until the shock wore off. Thousands of loose bits of planning paper, though individually tolerable in terms of rustle, had the combined auditory force of broadcast static blasted over a loudspeaker inches from his head when it all whacked onto him simultaneously… and now the only things Metro Man could hear were his own muffled complaints and his heartbeat roaring in his ears.

Annoyed, shocked, and grudgingly impressed with his very clever if comical little nemesis, Metro Man knelt down and started trying to pull the mercilessly well-adhered bits of ridiculousness off of himself. That was when he realized the DE-GUN beam that had summoned the papers must have also activated a dormant adhesive, because he was having considerable trouble getting the evil things off without taking his costume and hair off with them.

The first thing he got uncovered after freeing his fingers was his mouth, at which point he couldn't help snapping. " _Son of a Jack-o-Lantern!_ Did you  ** _glue_** _these?_  How does that even  _work!?_ "

He had been hoping for a monologue on how he couldn't possibly understand the intricacies of manufacturing multi-functional weapons of evil, but Megamind and Minion were both wisely, and strangely, remaining silent. All the hero could sense was the vibrations in the floor through his knees and toes that indicated they were essentially  _scampering off_. He couldn't even tell what direction they were going in or how fast, just that the vibrations were getting weaker. And yet again Metro Man found himself impressed.

Anyone else with his powers wouldn't have been bothered with simply burning and flailing his way out of this. Megamind's strategy on this trap was relying entirely on how much Metro Man didn't want to cause them any harm if it could be avoided, and it was working. As far as a 'run for it' plan went, this was a damned good one, even considering the powers they were up against.

That was the biggest difference between a normal mobster-type villain and scientist. Scientists made it their purpose in life to figure out what to do by proving what  _wouldn't_  work until they found something that  _did_ , no matter how stupid it initially seemed. The more they failed, the more they learned. In a way they craved failure because it taught them what direction was the wrong one to go in and showed them, purely by misdirection, the right path. Logic played a surprisingly minuscule part in a lot of their reasoning. Whereas most villains thought bigger and better guns might help (they did not) Megamind would see a Metro Man pinata in a storefront, put two and eighty four and electrically-activated adhesive together, and come up with THIS. And it would work far better than anything the purely logically-minded people would come up with.

Damn it, too, because this was annoying. He'd already scared the hell out of them. His only morally acceptable choice was to meticulously peel the things off, even if it took a while.

Eventually Metro Man managed to free his head, hands, and enough of his body to move unimpeded… though now he looked like a walking advertisement for Megamind's desperate need for a filing cabinet… or a truckload of them. If he tried to take off any more of the papers he would be having an already awkward conversation Au natural since the paper and fabric refused to relinquish their bond, which Megamind would only have himself to blame for.

Metro Man was essentially wearing a suit made of plans for capers he had already thwarted.

And Megamind and Minion were  _gone_. Most of Minion was there, though, because Megamind had simply snatched the bowl off of the robot body and scarpered.

Metro Man stood there and grumbled to himself.

When Megamind actually had a  ** _reason_**  not to get caught he was a slippery little bastard indeed. This might be harder than he thought.

* * *

 

THERE - the DE-COUPAGE setting has a function. You're welcome! ^_^


	3. The Charm of the Game

**The Charm of the Game**

"Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we're indifferent to whether we win or lose?" ~ Charles Baudelaire

* * *

 

Megamind didn't start verbally ranting until he was certain that Metro Man was far behind them. When he did, though, it was only what he had been furiously thinking to himself since they'd left.

"Of all the boneheaded-!" he snarled angrily and kicked a discarded soda can into the distance on a rare patch of shoveled blacktop right in front of a door. Megamind trudged through the snow-packed lesser known alleyways of the outer limits of the warehouse district with Minion's tank cradled against his chest, cape wrapped as well as he could manage about both of them to keep out the frigid wind. The blizzard the night before had been fairly standard for Metrocity, meaning that the blue man's boots were serving their purpose well and the height was definitely needed. He was practically wading in shaved ice.

"How  _dare_  that arrogant cape-clad  **cad**! He  _knows_  that my evil lair is off limits! Our  _respective_  lairs are! This will certainly  **not**  go unpunished. That was  _rude, unprofessional,_  and furthermore-"

Minion pressed himself against the warmer glass touching Megamind. "Does Metro Man even have a lair, Sir?"

"He must, Minion," Megamind insisted. "He certainly doesn't inhabit Scott Manor, has no legal address outside a simple 'Metrocity, Michigan', and has to sleep eventually."

"...you know his legal address?" the fish asked incredulously.

Megamind continued as if he hadn't been interrupted. "At least I remember him laying down on his desk in shool… but maybe he was just bored. Oh well. All I need do NOW is locate the place my hated enemy lays his head," the shivering alien seethed.

"Er… why?"

Megamind snapped, "So I can  _blow it up_!"

Minion rolled his eyes and chided him. "A bomb? You're not in school anymore, Sir. Isn't that a bit too simple and childish for your level of villainy?"

" _HE_  STARTED IT!" Megamind bit petulantly.

"Point," Minion drawled. "At least we got away."

"Yes, we escaped. Twice today. But only the latter was due to my brilliance." Megamind shuddered and paused when a particularly persistent wind lashed them. He took a deep breath and held it a moment. Whereas Minion was currently in warm water, though it was cooling by the second, Megamind felt every moment in the cold bite into him like needles. This wasn't even his heated cape and Minion's temperature regulator for the tank was an attachment inside the body, not the tank itself. Although separating them had been necessary to prevent Metro Man from hearing the metal body's mechanisms as they escaped, Megamind would have to find Minion somewhere warm quickly.

"For some reason he  _let_ us escape this morning, Minion. You must have noticed. I want to know  _why_. He's acting strangely. Even if Metro Man had a reason for infiltrating my lair that I am not aware of it isn't like him to indulge in demonstrations of his absurd strength without provocation."

"So, 'Why'd he smash the speaker?', basically," Minion summarized.

"Yes, quite s-"

"Don't try to say 'succinct' again, sir," Minion interrupted quickly.

"Oh,fine." Megamind kicked at a snowdrift, slipped on ice, and barely managed to catch himself on a nearby crate.

"Don't drop me!" Minion complained, unnerved by the near-miss.

"Sorry, sorry! I'll be more careful," Megamind promised, gripping the tank more securely. He would have to hurry. He was having trouble feeling his fingers. "Not to worry, Minion. I have a spare body for you stashed nearby in one of the smaller hideouts."

"Really? I didn't know I had a spare!" Minion said excitedly.

Megamind started walking again toward a lot where he hoped there would be a clearer path. "It was supposed to be a present, but I suppose that's ruined now."

Minion did a little flip and grinned. "Oh, you spoil me, Sir! A new model! Is it still a gorilla?"

"Of course," he promised.

"When do you think we can go back to the main hideout?" Minion blinked and looked up when he realized they had stopped. Green eyes were wide and watching the sky. "Sir?"

Megamind shushed the fish urgently and ducked into a doorway that had a very small steel awning over it and black garbage bags piled up right next to it, not covered by the night's snow. He set the tank down carefully amidst the bags and crouched down himself, pulling his black cape over both of them so that they blended in with the uninteresting alleyway scene. A nonverbal conversation ensued, with Minion motioning upward with his eyes to ask, "Is he up there?" and Megamind nodding minutely.

They remained there for several minutes. Metro Man very rarely used his X-ray to peer past the roofline, simply looking under ceilings into the rooms and stopping there. If they were still and silent there was a good chance he would miss them and only glance past the awning but not into the pile of bags. This honestly wasn't even the first time they'd used this particular trick - what hero would suspect an enemy of Megamind's caliber hiding amongst refuse?

During this time the blue body steadily shook more violently, cooling more rapidly without the ability to move to keep warm. Minion motioned several times with his eyes and bob-like 'nods' for them to continue, but Megamind was determined to stubbornly stay put until he was certain that his enemy must have moved on.

At last Minion had had enough and snapped a curt, "Sir!" to indicate he was done being quiet. "You need to get warm NOW," he said in his best 'Mr. Mom' tone.

The volume made Megamind jump a little and glare. "Minion, he'll hear you," he hissed.

"But he's unlikely to see us anymore if he doesn't hear us, right? If you keep moving I'll be quiet, Sir."

Grumbling, but knowing better than to argue, Megamind lifted the tank and moved on. Thankfully they saw no other trace of their nemesis and made it to a smaller warehouse in an area where even the more common criminals found the dilapidated older buildings too inconvenient to use. One little structure there was only about 20 by 20 feet, one level, ancient, and appeared as if it might collapse at any time. It was sandwiched between two larger buildings and had rusting metal gates on the remaining sides; only narrow alleyways too small for a reasonably large man to pass through without turning sideways first separated them from the actual structure. It was the perfect shell for a villainous hidey-hole and occasionally squirreling away Christmas presents from nosy cohorts.

Megamind set Minion's tank down and had to recite the passcode twice for the voice recognition to understand him because his teeth were chattering. Once inside he simply held the tank and sat on the floor next to the closed door while the climate-controlled interior both relieved and made his skin burn from the drastic difference at once. As always, his lairs were kept at a constant 85 degrees and separated him and his little world from the rest of the world.

As he sat there Megamind laughed manically inside his head. Of  _course_  the cold had made his body numb but for a few er… creased places that were drenched with sweat after carrying Minion nearly a mile through calf-deep snow. Didn't it just nicely complete his day that he was uncomfortably numb almost everywhere  **except**  the one spot he wished he couldn't feel right now? The salts in his sweat, at the moment, made it feel as if someone had put, well… salt on his damaged flesh.

As the warmth seeped in through him Megamind's shaking only continued; whereas the former had been a reaction to the cold, his current tremors were due to discomfort.

Thankfully Minion misinterpreted his obvious distress and suggested he go and take a hot shower, which would hopefully solve both problems. Megamind only nodded and made a point of connecting Minion's neural interface to his new body (so that he could put pull himself together, so to speak) while Megamind was unable to do so on his behalf.

Once in the bathroom Megamind vied instead to take a long bath; a luxury he seldom indulged in. Being raised where he had been the blue man was unaccustomed to anything but showers and had simply continued that trend outside his childhood home until this very lair had been built… since an old bathtub had already been stored there and easily enough restored to a usable state. Now there were several tubs in various smaller lairs; partly since it helped when he needed to quickly regulate his temperature, but mostly because he just liked to soak from time to time.

Half an hour later, after a long time languishing in steaming water had stopped his tremors and calmed his nerves, Megamind realized the pain had mostly stopped as well. For a while he simply enjoyed that feeling before bothering to do anything about it, but eventually relented and inspected himself for causes.

He didn't even get past looking at the water before he spotted an unsettlingly familiar purplish thing floating near the surface.

The water had saturated the damaged flesh and made it pliable enough to simply detach, leaving only the open wound where it had been bleeding freely in the water which, appeased by the heat and lack of salt, had stopped throbbing.

He was initially concerned, but after a mental assessment of how little pain there was he decided that he was probably fine. It was expected that there would be some features of his body that didn't quite match up with human biology and an extra orifice, comparatively, was minor. Now Megamind just wondered what it was FOR. Clearly he was not seriously injured because there was no sign of infection, or any connection to any vital organs that appeared to be damaged, or even just general discomfort aside from the point of detachment; but this was just damned… weird.

His initial inspection of the situation had composed of visual examination and a bit of finger probing, at which point he felt an eerily familiar surge of sensation and abruptly given up out of embarrassment.

Now he only had more questions than answers.

For him that situation was worse than physical pain. He honestly would have preferred to know he was simply hurt rather than discovering this odd new feature of his body. It only made him feel more alien, and he hadn't thought that was possible.

Megamind, still in the water, rested his head on his arms on the edge of the bathtub and brooded. Of course it made sense that there were some things about his own body that he wouldn't know. Eight day old infants weren't exactly going to understand any explanation on that point, so trying would have been pointless. His parents had done more than enough for him by simply creating him and ensuring he survived the end of their world, but he would be lying through his teeth if he said he never resented his lonesome fate, though it was far more bearable with Minion.

Perhaps it wouldn't bother him as much if he didn't remember it all so excruciatingly well.

Eight days of life, even for an infant, is plenty of time for a being like Megamind to absorb massive amounts of knowledge. It was called Hyperthymesia on Earth and considered somewhat of a very rare disease for those who had it, though it was a species-wide trait for his own people (he could only assume) and worked for him as perfectly as any computer bank with none of the drawbacks humans typically suffered from.

His memory was pristine and every single moment of consciousness was part of a devastatingly efficient system allowing instant recall. Every second of life from the time he became aware in the womb before birth was burned into his mind and readily available for viewing at the slightest effort. If asked to he could recite every word he had ever heard verbatim, tell you who said it and when, and explain all of the ways they were wrong (particularly in the case of his school teacher). He could tell you the weather every day of his life, where he had been when it occurred, and how it had influenced the events of the day. He could remember every happy moment, as well as all the sad ones.

That last one was, upon reflection, a definite drawback for Megamind.

There were some advantages, though. The memories of the faces and voices of his parents were things that had comforted him nightly as a child sleeping in his cold cell. He remembered what it felt like to be born and held for the first time and that the first thing he had seen in the outer world was his father's brown eyes. It should have been a happy memory. It wasn't. Instead of rejoicing in his birth all his parents could do was hold him and cry because they knew his death was approaching already. The only pleasant memories he had of them were how much they cared, the feel of their warmth, the taste of his mother's milk, and the sound of his real name being said in their voices.

He muttered it quietly to himself sometimes, when he needed comfort. Only he and Minion knew it, and he was loath to tell anyone. They didn't deserve it anyhow. His moniker would have to do.

Sometimes he really wished he had the ability to forget. Just as those precious memories of his parents burned brightly, so too did the ever-present panic that permeated the air and the tense atmosphere of an entire population feeling their death come closer with every passing second. He remembered being carried along and desperately hushed while they scrounged scrap metal to build a craft that, by any measure of quality standards, should definitely not have functioned for how hastily it was assembled.

When they placed him in the pod Megamind knew that neither of his brilliant parents had slept in days.

As his pod carried him safely away Megamind remembered the feeling of the forces propelling him away from danger warring with the pit of despair as he realized he was being sent away… and his parents weren't coming with him. Loss a cruel thing for an infant to understand implicitly, as well as the concept of death, but by the time he had arrived on Earth Megamind suffered from both.

He truly envied Metro Man's lack of awareness on the issue with an intensity that sometimes seemed to cause physical pain. Not remembering those terrible moments was likely the one of the only reasons that his planetary neighbor had turned out so disgustingly good. Power corrupts, and infinite power corrupts infinitely. Combining that with the sort of pain Megamind felt when he remembered his past would have been a volatile combination indeed. It was fortunate that Lady Scott had taught her 'gift' well, and if Lord Scott had done anything worthwhile for his adopted son it was paying him no mind. Megamind knew the man had as much care for his family as a collector does for bottle caps; he had them because he was expected to.

Knowing that last bit made Megamind almost grateful he hadn't been raised a Scott. In a strange way Metro Man had rescued him that day. Being raised in a prison might not have been the best of childhoods, but at least the Warden and guards and convicts acknowledged his existence.

Metro Man had only had one attentive parent; Megamind had dozens.

He smiled a little, remembering that. Yes, he'd been fortunate. Everyone had loss, and Megamind had little reason to be miserable in comparison to others, especially since he had a warm place to be right now in this icy season. Thanks to lots of wonderful things in his life that had gone right and set him on the path to glory!

And now that the damaged skin was gone, the rest of his body was healing at its normal pace. The bleeding had already stopped, the area was merely sore as if he'd been scraped, and no other pains indicated danger. So that was one major problem solved, or at least safely reduced in importance.

Things were looking up already!

Now he only had two problems; figuring out what his body was up to, and plotting his next great battle!

Megamind sat back, letting the heat continue to soothe him, and smiled to himself while he concocted more detailed schematics for his Robo-Sheep. Enough of the supplies for that plan were here for him to start working on it today, even!

Life was good.

* * *

 

Metro Man remembered almost too late that he could still track Megamind via scent the same way he tracked Roxanne's perfume, which was lucky because the clever bastard had really thrown him for a loop on that whole paper mache thing. Metro Man had been forced to go home and change, then start looking again while running little hero errands along the way, and just hope either Megamind or Minion would slip up and be loud enough to be noticed.

They had  **not** , which was both weird and annoying, but at least he'd been able to track the lingering sweet scent enough to know they hadn't left the warehouse district before the lake-driven winds blew it completely away. Despite his best efforts there was no way of knowing past a certain alley where they had gone, and his x-ray was only so helpful if he didn't know exactly where to look with it.

Had he really freaked them out that much? He hoped not… because they seemed legitimately hard to catch given the right motivation to flee. Even though he knew about it now, Metro Man was relatively certain he still couldn't stop that setting on the DE-GUN unless he took a risk with his laser-vision to get out of it, possibly by aiming at his own hands to cut through, but then what if the whole covering just caught fire? Then he'd really be a danger to anyone nearby and just have to stand still until the fire burned out, because knowing Megamind's chemistry skills simply dousing it with water was unlikely to work.

He sighed and kept looking, concentrating on the areas of town where Megamind had tended to store his giant robots and miscellaneous items that had to do with his schemes per se but still wound up getting incorporated at some point regardless. He would never, ever forget the blue rose incident last Halloween. Luckily that one had escaped being televised because, well, they tended to escape the cameras from time to time during a chase, even if they were Megamind's own cameras.

Despite getting sidetracked along the way, Metro Man began to realize that easily 90% of those little areas were very meticulously soundproofed. It made perfect sense given the ease with which Metro Man could hone in on a familiar voice, no matter the distance, which Megamind would certainly be prepared for. Though knowing where the MAIN lair was located was a matter of fair play, these smaller ones must be where he went when he wanted to, truly, be unnoticed. With the very walls of these lairs preventing the most common method of locating him, Megamind would be free to rant aloud to himself all he liked without getting discovered, and Minion could be free to sing as loud as he wanted, and the frequent 'bow-bow' sound of the Brainbots would never need to be hushed, and very few of the quite frequent explosions would attract unwanted attention from either Heroes or general authorities. As far as noise was concerned, those lairs were completely impenetrable.

Which gave Metro Man a surprising advantage.

Metro Man was assaulted by constant pandemonium at all times. A large city was no place for a being with super-hearing to get any rest without becoming accustomed to it. Sirens, vehicles, machines, footsteps, chatter, the hum of electricity, endless channels broadcast over endless televisions and radios, hairdryers, water going just everywhere at all hours, neighbors interacting with each other, kitchen utensils and pots banging… it NEVER ended. The endless uproar faded into the background most of the time. Metro Man assumed that his brain had simply learned to filter it out when he was a baby to keep him from dying of sheer exhaustion and lack of REM sleep. It was frustrating, but also had its benefits.

If he closed his eyes and let that din wash over him like so much white noise and concentrated on EVERYTHING as opposed to one thing at a time, the pockets of noiseless space became easy to pick out. Like the small, usually unobtrusive tick-tock of a clock that suddenly became loud at night in comparison, the penetrating chaos helped him single out the calm areas. Megamind's own skill betrayed him in this matter as well; he was so effective at a task like this that the far less efficient human methods of soundproofing were no match for Metro Man's ears. He heard through the foam and tiles and insulation easily, and Megamind's far more skillfully soundproofed lairs floated to the surface like black buoys in a glowing ocean of relentless racket.

Ironically, the ability to hear  _everything_  also allowed him to hear  _nothing_.

Grinning victoriously, he started x-raying those voids around the areas where the blue alien's sweet scent had faded.

Soon after, Metro Man landed quite fluidly by the door of a tiny and dilapidated structure with a VERY solid and silent inner core and... politely knocked on the door.

Minion jumped in surprise at the noise and glared momentarily at the sewing needle now sticking out of the finger of his new suit. "Who on Earth…?" He mused to himself and flipped the switch of a monitor that would show him the exterior of the lair. The fish let out a strangled squeak and pointed with his fanged mouth wide. "Sir… SIR!"

Megamind poked his head out of the bathroom where he had been pulling his pajamas on and rolled his eyes. "What is it, Minion?"

"We have company," the henchman said anxiously.

Megamind groaned and came out to look at the monitor, then jumped back with a similar strangled squeak as his caretaker had emitted. Quickly he ran back to put on something less… fuzzy and comfortable while ranting the whole way and fervently hoping the brute hadn't been watching for more than… well, more than five seconds, actually. "He followed me  **again**  after I escaped fair and square!?" Megamind gasped, genuinely hurt. "Have I been framed for something more heinous than my usual fare?"

"Er… watch that pronunciation there, Sir," Minion said. He rushed back and helped his boss dress, both of them falling easily into the routine, and Megamind was presentable for evil in record time.

"That IS how to say 'heinous', Minion!" Megamind snapped.

"Oh…"

"He's not following the  ** _rules_**!" Megamind hissed menacingly and glared back up at the screen. Disconcertingly, Metro Man knocked again while looking through the door at what Megamind knew was his own position in the structure. He was certain the hero could NOT hear them, positive actually, and with the noise of the city in the background it should have been-

"Oh, HELL that's how he found us!" Megamind bit out suddenly, smacking himself on the forehead. "Overdid it as usual," he groaned. "Too quiet is just as bad as not quiet enough. Damn it."

"So… if he isn't going to follow the rules," Minion suddenly cracked a fanged smile. "...then why should we?"  
Megamind stroked his goatee and hummed thoughtfully. "Good point, Minion. I don't know what's going on here but if Metro Mahn insists on being annoying… so will we. Places!" he instructed with a little grin.

"Uh… where are my-?" Minion asked sheepishly.

"In the Halloween box just there."

* * *

 

Metro Man sighed and knocked on the door for a third time. He was listening for any sign of them leaving so he could catch them outside if they decided to bolt again. He had seen the beginnings of a little temper tantrum from a pajama-clad Megamind and politely stopped looking in to give him time to dress. Then he stood there waiting because he a) didn't want to get turned into an art project again and b) the whole point of this was to have an actual  _conversation_ , and breaking through walls or doors in a second lair in a row today was only going to make that more difficult than it had already proven to be.

Just as he was about to knock a third time and was suppressing an irritated growl, Minion answered the door holding a notebook and wearing, inexplicably, a pair of round glasses frames that had no lenses and had been altered to fit over his aquatic body as if the whole of him was a head.

Minion gave Metro Man an utterly unimpressed look and glanced down at the paper, then back up at the hero. "I don't see that you have an appointment today, sorry. You'll have to come back later. And we'll need to reschedule tomorrow's usual kidnapping as well. Miss Ritchie has an important meeting that we don't want to interrupt."

Metro Man faltered, blindsided by this. "What?"

"The schedule, Metro Man," Minion sighed. "Your…  _unsportsmanlike_  conduct complicated an awful lot of plots we had in the works, you know. We had to move to a different lair and everything! It was just very inconsiderate of you."

"There's NO schedule," the hero insisted tightly, momentarily forgetting what he was there for. Vaguely he heard Megamind snicker from inside the lair just before the loud sound of an evil genius at work began. "Is there?" He asked as an afterthought.

Minion laughed a polite little secretarial laugh. "Oh, there wouldn't be any fun in it if  **you**  knew the schedule. Miss Ritchi on the other hand… well, she wouldn't be as useful as a publicity tool if we got her fired, would she? So every once in a while if she has a very important thing she needs to do, she'll let me know while we're waiting for you to arrive for the battle-"

"Minion!" Megamind called from inside, accompanied by the sound of welding sparks. "Don't forget her niece's birthday next week!"

"Oh, right, Sir. I'll make a note of that," Minion said pleasantly, jotting that down on the paper. "Wednesday next week, five to seven p.m. – Miss Ritchie Unavailable…" he read aloud. Then he looked back up at Metro Man and smiled a polite little secretarial smile. "Now, if you'd like to make an appointment?"

Metro Man lifted a brow and crossed his arms. "Am I being dismissed?" he asked incredulously.

"Yes," both Megamind and Minion snapped simultaneously, and then Minion shut the door.

Metro Man stood there and gaped for a moment before he could grasp what had just happened.

This was… new.

Clearly they weren't scared anymore, which was a plus for actually talking, but the definite drawback of that in terms of getting in there was that  _they weren't scared anymore_. To make matters worse he definitely hadn't been able to hear their conversation before the door had opened, and now that it was shut again he  _still_ couldn't hear them. Curiously he looked inside and saw Megamind continuing to weld, though his shoulders were shaking with suppressed laughter and his work was definitely uneven as a result, and Minion was leaning on the counter chuckling so hard he was bobbing in his bowl.

Even though he knew his body didn't work that way, Metro Man pinched the bridge of his nose the way his mother always did when she was trying to quell a headache. He counted to ten, then to twenty when the urge to just rip the whole door off hadn't subsided. Then he gave up and simply pulled the door open by bracing his thumb against the ancient bricks.

"HEY!" Megamind snapped off the torch, yanked off his goggles, and turned to glare at him. Surprisingly he didn't do much more and simply sighed before putting the tools away. "I suppose just breaking the  **lock**  is better than the  _wall_  or the  _door_ …" he mused.

Minion hummed thoughtfully while he continued sewing something that looked suspiciously like a Brainbot-sized cape. "Not very heroic, though."

"I mean, what ever happened to good old fashioned mayhem?" Megamind lamented with his hands in the air dramatically.

"Sir, just because you put 'good old fashioned' in front of something doesn't make it traditional."

"SEH-man-TICS, Minion," Megamind said dismissively.

" _Semantics_ ," Metro Man corrected irritably. "Look; I'm not playing today."

"Clearly," Megamind snapped acidly. He strode up to Metro Man and faced him as squarely as he could, which meant tipping his head back awfully far to meet his much taller enemies' eyes. "If you're going to take me to jail  **do it** , otherwise  _go away_. I'm  _busy_."

"I'm  _not_  going to take you to jail," Metro Man defended.

Megamind held out his wrists blithely. "SEE, Minion? I told you he was…" His pre-prepared speech petered off as he actually processed those words. "Then why in the name of science are you  _still chasing me_? Did I do something to piss you off on a personal level or what? Honestly; I'd like to know."

"No, it's nothing like that," Metro Man insisted. "I know I've broken some rules, but I'm calling a truce for a while-"

"YOU are calling a truce after YOU broke the rules!?" Megamind hissed irately and threw his welding goggles, which bounced uselessly off the hero's chest and clattered to the floor. "What could possibly be so important to you that doesn't involve Miss Ritchi or hauling me off to my first home for a visit that would justify-"

"I need to apologize," Metro Man blurted before he could come up with anything with more finesse.

Megamind blinked rapidly before backing up a step or two. "For  _what_  exactly?" he asked suspiciously. "Breaking into my lair without provocation? Destroying an invention that was nothing more than a fancy noisemaker? Or forcing us out into weather you  _know_  is dangerous?"

Metro Man sighed and rubbed the back of his neck while he thought about how to start explaining. He hadn't quite figured that bit out yet. "All of that and a little more. It's complicated."

Megamind crossed his arms and lifted a brow. "Did you rampage through my lair or something after we left?"

"What? No, I-"

"You swear you didn't break anything else? What about the ra-bahts in storage?" Megamind asked insistently. He strode forward and poked the hero's chest with his long blue finger. "It took me a LONG time to put those together and I should not have to remind you sabotage is-" Here Megamind paused and his eye simply twitched. "I swear if you touched them there will be hell to pay."

Metro Man sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose again. "I didn't destroy anything but that speaker. And it's  **robot**. Say it with me:  _Row-bot_ ," he said slowly, gesturing for each syllable.

Megamind cheerfully continued and turned to tak-tak on the keys of his console. "That's what I said. Ra-baht."

"No, you said-" Metro Man palmed his forehead. "Alright, say something that  _rhymes_  with robot at least, then try again. Teapot, slingshot, boycott-" he offered desperately.

Megamind grinned and continued pushing buttons on the console without even looking at them as he faced his nemesis. "Lord Scott," he said flippantly.

Metro Man glared red for a moment, but Megamind merely stared confidently back at him until he chuckled and shook his head. "I still can't tell if you're doing that on purpose."

Megamind huffed and crossed his arms. "Doing  _what_?" he challenged.

"The," Metro Man began, then faltered. "Do you even-? Nevermind. Just listen for a minute."

"No," Megamind stated flatly. Metro Man and Minion both watched as the blue man strode to the door and held it open, as it had swung shut from the wind once the larger man had stepped through. With a flourish he bowed mockingly and gestured through to the outside. "If you aren't going to take me to jail and you aren't attacking and don't have a better reason to be here than some misdirected attack of conscience, then please leave."

Metro Man held back a growl that he felt bubbling up in his chest and tried one last time to be reasonable. "I asked for a truce, Megamind."

"And I am denying it," the villain insisted. "Get out."

And this was what it always came down to in the end. A battle. Megamind was impossible to communicate with unless there was a fight involved somehow as far back as Metro Man could remember. Unless Metro Man won and had earned the right to speak freely outside of their usual banter he was seldom heeded for an instant.

"Fine," he agreed. "Let's play it your way, then."

Megamind stood straight again when he heard that tone, already knowing something was amiss.

"Wha-"

That was the only syllable he managed to utter before Metro Man snatched him up and flew away. Minion sighed and shut the door, hoping that Megamind would at least sleep well once he got to prison. He needed a good rest after spending so much time outside today. Twice now, in fact.


	4. A Lot More Complicated

A Lot More Complicated

"All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place."~ Douglas Adams

* * *

 

"This is just unprofessional! Let go of me!" Megamind demanded, predictably irate over his predicament and twisting around to try and glare at the appropriate target rather than the rapidly dwindling landscape he was facing. The wind whipped at him mercilessly as they flew and he had to squint just to be able to see in it, lest the moisture over his eyeballs either dry or freeze and make things difficult until he decided to close and rub them, which he couldn't do because his arms were trapped in the grip of a man that he had literally seen squeeze coal into diamond.

Metro Man looked down at him moodily and nodded toward the icy water of the Great Lakes that they were passing over below. "Keep squirming and I might," he warned.

"Oh, pull the other one!" Megamind yelled. He knew damned well the man could hear him over the wind, but Megamind could barely hear himself over it and anyway it made him feel better to shout. "I might have believed that when you were sixteen; now it's just pathetic posturing for your petulant populace!"

"…okay, fair enough," Metro Man agreed. He definitely wasn't about to drop Megamind, but the suggestion normally made him hush. "But nobody's watching right now, are they?"

"So stop at 'pathetic' then," the smaller alien snapped. He had stopped struggling to either turn or get loose, knowing both to be useless, but hadn't given up on possible escape yet. He didn't know where he was going to land or what the terrain would be like, but he wasn't about to make this easy. "Where are you taking me?"

"Somewhere we can talk. Look ahead."

Megamind strained to do so through the falling snow that was drastically reducing visibility, then snorted derisively. "…I have an orbiting Death-Ray pointed directly at that observatory, you know."

"Sure you do," Metro Man muttered blithely.

Megamind mentally preened. Score one for reverse psychology. Thank science his rival was only as intelligent as the average human and not, mentally, any sort of a threat. It hadn't escaped him that his nemesis was flying at a speed that would keep the wind from being too brutal on his passenger, and had made certain, as if accidentally, to keep Megamind's cape wrapped securely about his body as they flew. Still, this was a level of rude he would not tolerate. Metro Man had broken so many rules today that he was well and officially exempt from courtesy for quite some time.

There would now be hell to pay. One way or another he would have vengeance for this indignity.

Though he would keep Miss Ritchie out of it, of course.

Once they landed (descending through the opening in the roof of the observatory and in the relatively protected dome) the first thing Metro Man did was hesitate to let his captured enemy go. This was presumably because he knew how cold it was, but Megamind was having none of it and snarled and struggled until he was released anyway, at which point he stood and glared and shivered at him angrily. There was a long moment of staring and mutual awkwardness before one of them broke the albeit windy silence.

"Why haven't you turned on the heater in that cape yet?" Metro Man asked.

"How do you know this is one my heated capes?" Megamind frowned.

"I can see the wires," he drawled. "Here-"

Before Megamind could stop him, Metro Man reached out and underneath the edge of the cape near Megamind's left shoulder where the control was. He just managed to turn it on before reflex allowed Megamind to snarl and yank himself away from him. The slight click of the dial heralded blessed comfort, but the blue man continued to be angry regardless. He'd had quite enough.

Megamind, face like thunder, then treated his rival with an admittedly well-deserved verbal tirade that conclusively proved three things; a) he was now well and truly furious, b) his pronunciation habits carried over into the  _entirety_  of his vocabulary and c) he had most definitely been raised in (and thus taught to speak in) a prison by a large number of generally impolite people from a great range of social and economic backgrounds who collectively spoke a wide variety of languages. Regardless of what percentage of the actual  **words**  Metro Man was able to understand, the tone and inflection was quite clear, and it was definitely not a banter session because Megamind hadn't left even the slightest opening for Metro Man to cut in. When it finally wound down, more because the villain had run out of breath than from running out of words, he simply stood there and tried to catch his breath.

Metro Man was momentarily stunned, but recovered enough to comment, "That was… impressive."

" _SHUT UP_!" Megamind snapped viciously enough to make the larger alien flinch. That said, he tactically waited just long enough for Metro Man to try speaking again, then interrupted. "I  _just_  got warm, too, after trudging through this hellish weather after you chased me out of my main lair, and you had to  _drag me back out here **again**_ ," he finished with one last, and brutally true, complaint once he had the air to fuel it. "What do you think you are doing?"

Metro Man let out a breath, trying to be patient. "To be fair, I asked for a truce so we could talk. You refused."

"Oh, what a surprise that your generous  **offer**  had no bearing on whether or not I had an actual choice in the matter!" the shivering alien sneered. "You may as well have kidnapped me without bothering with the niceties, Metro Man! Honestly it would have just saved time!"

"Now hang on. That's just uncalled for," Metro Man argued, disturbed by the word 'kidnapping'.

Megamind huffed and crossed his arms under the cape, which he refused to admit he was allowing to pool around him to block the wind. The charge was starting to filter through the fabric and heat the cape, at last, but it gave him little in the way of calm. They were inside the observatory, but had arrived after looters had gutted the place so the telescope and even the doors were gone, which left huge gaps for the cold to come in through. Megamind made a mental note to restore those before he used the orbital death ray. The place just lacked ambiance without them.

When the other didn't answer, Megamind turned away, looking out through the opening in the observatory roof where the sky shone through. "Now tell me what all this is about so I can go plot my revenge in proportion to how stupid it is," he demanded.

"Okay, okay," Metro Man sighed. Megamind was clearly not in a conducive mood for the inevitable reveal of the  ** _exact_**  circumstances... but he was definitely owed at the very least an explanation of sorts; as close as Metro Man could get without giving himself away. The goal here was to get Megamind help and that just wasn't going to happen if he was too mad to agree to go to a doctor in the first place.

'Why couldn't you tell me where I was!? It's not as if I could have stopped you!" Megamind demanded irately when the larger male's pause went on for too long.

"Yes you could have. That DE-GUN setting," Metro Man began helplessly.

"Did you  _see_  much planning paper hanging in that lair?" he challenged. "Compared to the warehouse that place is a postage stamp!"

"I… didn't think of that," the hero admitted reluctantly. "And I didn't think you'd want to talk about this in front of Minion either."

"What would I not be able to talk about in front of Minion?"

Metro Man grumbled and palmed his face. "I'm sorry," he began as calmly as he could. "I don't know what made me break your last invention. I heard it and my vision just went red and I had crushed it before I even knew what was happening. I was  _not_  trying to chase you out of your lair and I didn't even intend to go in until I heard that horrible noise."

"You-" Megamind blinked, suddenly interested. "What? It affected you too?"

Megamind was engaged in the conversation now. Good. For the sake of a greater good Metro Man blurted out a lie. Not for the first time in his life, but the first time that he really knew he was screwing himself sideways. Eventually, inevitably, Megamind WOULD find out it was a lie - he was too smart not to - and there would be retribution. For now, it was all he could do to keep from making the situation explode into something he wasn't sure even he could deal with AND get Megamind help at the same time. Megamind had to agree to get help because, being an alien himself, Metro Man wasn't about to force the matter; it would feel like being abducted by scientists and experimented on. Even Metro Man had suffered nightmares about that, and he was  _bulletproof_.

"I only went out there in the first place to check on you after the fight. It started out the same old routine," he started reluctantly. He decided to ramble a little to create the impression he was nervous about this whole thing… which was entirely accurate. "We were fighting, you were monologuing, Roxanne was just being herself, I was going to stop you… and then we started the battle and all of a sudden I could smell your blood and I KNEW I hadn't hit you and couldn't see any on the outside and-" Metro Man shook his head while Megamind watched him curiously. "I panicked. I thought maybe it was internal. Maybe  ** _I_**  didn't hit you but something I had thrown might have ricocheted off something else and doubled back at you. So I decided to sort of... look into it."

Metro Man didn't leap back per se, but he had flown backward more than six feet by the time Megamind advanced on him with a shocked and decidedly scandalized expression.

"You mean look into  _me_ ," The blue man hissed darkly. He backed away again after Metro Man lifted his hands defensively until they were practically on opposite sides of the observatory against the farthest walls they could manage. Megamind's awareness of the world centered on the matter at hand. "Is THAT why you kept chasing me!?" he challenged, clearly insulted. "You were on some misguided mission to  _save the poor villain_!?"

Metro Man didn't answer for too long yet again; he merely hovered there on his side of the observatory looking uncomfortable, though a nervous cough did escape him.

"That is an entirely new level of cheating, Metro Mahn," Megamind informed him angrily. "And RUDE at the very least. So tell me, did you find anything interesting?"

Megamind expected another apology for prying into the obviously private matter, inquiries on how the injury had occurred, even an offer to help him catch whoever was responsible if the Hero even dared to think that the wound was a result of an assault. Instead his fury cooled a bit to make room for confusion when Metro Man finally spoke again.

"We match," Metro Man said quietly.

Megamind stood straighter as if it would help him hear better. "What do you  _mean_ we match?"

"Our insides," the man said sternly. "The organs, where they are, what they look like... the shapes and colors and-"

Megamind put up a finger and ticked it back and forth chidingly. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no," he insisted. "You know  _very well_  what you saw and unless you're going to tell me you have a similar  _feature_ like the one I've discovered then we don't match at all, do we?"

Well, now that Megamind said it Metro Man couldn't help but flush a bit at the thought of having a… an extra opening on his own body. At the very least he'd win a hell of a lot of bar bets with that one.

"Okay, fair enough. You're right I don't have that particular feature," he admitted, using the politer term Megamind had decided to use. "Sorry."

Yet another apology and Metro Man could see genuine confusion in those huge green eyes. He had the little guy off-guard already just from a few nice words and logical agreement? Yeah he was clearly in pain already but just being reasonable at him shouldn't be working  _this_  well. At least it never had before. "Look, I know it's weird that I know about it at all, but you need to go to a doctor to take a look at you if nothing else."

"Oh, I  _see_. And while we're there it would just make sense to take a few x-rays and do some tests to compare my alien-ness to yours, eh?" the blue man drawled suspiciously. "And I assume you're familiar with this doctor. And old family friend, perhaps? Someone specifically interested in alien biology?"

**_*Fudge buckets. He thinks I want him_ ** **studied _. *_**

Metro Man winced a little. How to handle this? It was uncomfortable, but probably much easier to deal with than trying to explain to Megamind that he wanted to get a checkup on his personal bits due to being the cause of the trauma down there to begin with. The echo of his first mental run-through of this conversation ("So I was watching you masturbate-") and the inevitable backlash of that could wait as long as Megamind actually went to the doctor. Actually, he didn't think he'd get halfway through that last word before the fight started.

"I have a family physician," Metro Man insisted. "When I was bor-" he winced and amended that quickly when Megamind's glare reached nearly nuclear levels. "-arrived on Earth my adoptive family had an expert hired to look me over since not many pediatricians have experience with kids that can fly and lift cars. He was eighty at the time and an expert in Exobiology and he's long gone by now, but his grandkid took over the job. Her name is Dr. Mardling."

" _Of **course**  it is_," Megamind groused acidly, painfully aware of the 'her' portion more than anything else. This whole situation clearly wasn't humiliating enough, so fate gave him a female doctor. What an appropriate finish on this utter ruin of a day! Megamind wondered if this squirmy lead-gut discomfort was how women felt when a white-haired old man came in to perform gynecology exams on them.

"Can we at least compare a few things?" Metro Man asked. "I swear I know what I saw. We're too similar internally for it to be a coincidence. Maybe not  _everything_ , but really close."

Megamind stood very still and scowled at the ground for so long that Metro Man wondered if he was even listening or just plotting revenge.

In reality the blue man's thoughts were mostly focused on searing embarrassment and not a small amount of anxious fear. Megamind hadn't even come to terms  _himself_ with the mortifying incident that had revealed his body's hidden feature yet! He could only guess the orifice had a sexual purpose given his body's reaction to his experimental probing in the bath and the fact that pressing there had always felt amazing even before he'd known what was there. Not only had Metro Man known about it since at least that morning but he wanted Megamind to submit to some no doubt extremely overpaid quack poking at him and asking humiliating questions. And on top of all that he'd just had a distressing thought; if he had no external testicles, and they weren't behind that patch of skin he was always pressing on,  _where were they,_  or at least their biological equivalent?

Well, this was just  _mortifying_. Of all the times for Metro Man to misuse his X-ray vision he had to do it  **now**!? Admittedly he had done so due to a legitimate concern that plagued the man often - his fear of accidentally causing irreparable harm to someone - and was merely doing his sickeningly heroic best to help, but still. At this point Megamind might have forgiven the idiot for breaking so many rules to get to his ridiculous offer if the situation was less achingly embarrassing. As it was Megamind just wanted to get out of this conversation and go back to his lair where he could occupy his mind with anything else and try to forget this day had even happened. Maybe even have a glass of wine and just go to fucking sleep.

Megamind almost seemed to squirm where he stood while he thought, eyes trained on Metro Man as if he expected an attack. Metro Man wondered if the pain was bothering him that much and decided to ignore it for now. It was going to be hard enough to pull this off without making the proud idiot run the hell off as it was, he did not need the backlash he would inevitably receive if he did something stupid like ask if Megamind could use human methods of pain relief… and why had that question never occurred to him before  _this moment_  was now yet another source of guilt. What if  _couldn't_ do something as simple as swallow Tylenol without terrible side-effects? Would it even do what it was supposed to and even relieve the pain? A lot of the injuries Megamind had received in their past battles seemed needlessly cruel now, despite how Metro Man had tried to avoid them.

Eventually Megamind seemed to gather himself and sneered accusingly. "Tell me, Metro Man, how do you suppose the good doctor's examination will go, exactly?"

"That's your business," he said honestly.

"Yes,  _Captain Cop-Out_ , it certainly is my business," Megamind drawled. "Which is why I am NOT going to let your adoptive family's pet scientist satisfy her alien obsession at my expense. Honestly I wonder what makes you think I'd allow anyone with a medical interest specifically in extraterrestrials anywhere near me. You may not have to worry about the tin foil hat crowd itching to take you apart, but Minion and I do!"

"Hey!" Offended, Metro Man landed, the clamp of his boots on the floor making Megamind startle. "If all I wanted was to get you there so they could cut you up then why would I be standing here trying to get you to go on your own? It'd be easier just to kidnap you!" Metro Man said this quietly, ignoring how flat-out angry it made him that Megamind would suspect him of something that wrong.

"And you didn't do that just now?" Megamind drawled.

Metro Man conspicuously avoided answering that. "She's not like that and neither was her father.  Why would I go with you if I thought they were going to hurt you?" Metro Man said this quietly, ignoring how flat-out angry it made him that Megamind would suspect him of something that wrong.

"I suppose you don't want me shooting up the place before they put me under for dissection," the blue man snarled right back. "I'm not going. NO!" he pointed at Metro Man's face just as the Hero opened his mouth to insist again. "If you had been paying attention to your senses before flying me all the way out here you would have noticed that the bleeding has  _stopped_. I'm healing quite normally now and the problem has been resolved. And I would greatly appreciate it if you accepted my word on that and  **didn't**  'look into it' again!"

Metro Man looked skeptical until he took a breath in through his nose and seemed to accept that. "Alright, I can't smell you bleeding anymore. But you should still see a doctor. There has to be a reason for that… space in there."

Megamind crossed his arms and his lips tightened into a thin, angry line… but Metro Man noticed the damning curiosity in his eyes even before the blue man spoke again. "What did you see exactly?"

"It's hard to describe," Metro Man said carefully. "Dr. Mardling could do a much better job than me. At least she probably wouldn't sound as stupid as I would trying to."

"That goes without saying," Megamind huffed. "But I am still not-"

"What if I go with you?"

"Still a 'no'," the smaller alien snapped, and turned to walk out through the doorless portal into the snow, already trying to figure out how to get a ride over the water without summoning either Minion or the Brain-bots to come and get him. With the heated cape he should be fine in the weather unless it picked up viciously, but still it'd take quite a while.

Metro Man glided over next to him and touched down, matching pace to walk right next to him. "I'm late for my own yearly checkup-"

"Ha. Does your mommy make you go every year?" Megamind teased.

"Yes," Metro Man sighed. "And I'm late. So let's make a deal."

Megamind turned and paused with a hand stroking his goatee. "Merely accompanying me there to ensure I'm not eviscerated for study won't convince me."

Metro Man sighed. "How about this; you don't have to do anything that I don't have to. Same doctor, same basic physical."

"Then she can't take samples of my skin or blood, since that is clearly outside her ability with you," the villain pointed out.

Metro Man shrugged. "We'll work that out when we get there."

"Meaning you intend to reason it out of me somehow. I'm curious; how do you plan to accomplish this? What could you offer me that'd be worth my cooperation on this matter?" Megamind challenged, starting to walk his typical villain rant circle around the hero. He had to stop though, since they had gotten too close to the doorway and nearly meeting the wall had forced him to stop. He glared momentarily at the offending barrier preventing his comfortable theatrical routine, then crossed his arms and faced his enemy again.

Look, Megs-" the DE-GUN was out and pointed before he even realized he'd used the disliked nickname, "Megamind. Nobody else on this whole damned planet knows what it's like to be the last of their kind. I don't have any fellow aliens to talk to. Just me and you-"

Clearly incensed, Megamind's leather glove squeaked a bit as his finger tensed over the trigger on reflex. "Add Minion or I'll  _shoot you anyway_!" he seethed.

"-and Minion," Metro Man conceded. Apparently breaking the 'stay-the-hell-out-of-my-lair' rule was a pretty serious one, and for the most obvious reason, if the demand for Minion's inclusion was any evidence. "Just come with me to see Dr. Mardling. I'll even stay to make sure she doesn't experiment on you or anything. Maybe we can learn something about ourselves or where we came from. Please."

Megamind slowly put the DE-GUN back and seemed to stand there and quietly fret.

"Megamind?" Metro Man asked cautiously.

Unseen by the Hero, the villain's mind was whirling at top speed. Given what that speed was, it was a miracle a physical tornado didn't form around him. Only seconds later he asked a question… but it took quite a lot of thinking to get there from the Hero's "Please".

* * *

 

Why NOW?

Why was Metro Man suddenly so interested in him outside of the usual game? Something must have changed. After all this time the man couldn't have just recently decided to be curious about the other alien for no particular reason. There had never been questions like this before! Megamind had been the weird blue kid from prison, the delinquent, the enemy… but never an equal in any way.

Never, not  _once_ , had Metro Man ever bothered to acknowledge Megamind as a 'fellow' alien.

For a moment Megamind allowed himself to be angry over it. How DARE he decide to care about this NOW when they were in their mid-thirties? Why not when they were children and Metro Boy got his first lesson in planets from that abominable woman in shool? Even if Metro Boy hadn't suspected he was an alien then if his parents hadn't fessed up about it, why not when they were in Middle Shool and the idiot actually brought in the  _very escape pod he arrived in_  for show-and-tell and Megamind lamented aloud that he didn't have his own anymore because the prison had given it away for study? Why not when they were teenagers and Megamind was teased almost daily with being dissected in anatomy class by thugs!?

True, that last one Metro Dude had actually intervened on once or twice… for which Megamind refused to admit he was in any way grateful and he most definitely had  _not_  ducked behind the other's bulk to shield himself from them. He had simply been heading in that direction already and the brute had gotten in his way. Yes, that was it.

Not once in all that time, though, had Metro Man asked about Megamind's escape pod, or how he had wound up in prison to begin with at such a young age, or even implied to the High Shool thugs that dissecting aliens was  _wrong_  (he had merely said that doing it to students was definitely illegal). He'd never asked how Megamind healed so quickly compared to the humans they socialized with or voiced interest in their worlds when Megamind brought it up that they came from the same quadrant in his speeches during multiple battles.

Most people would have been curious. Mot Metro Man. He blew those things off like they hadn't mattered, and eventually Megamind had grudgingly accepted that belief and stopped trying.

There had always, always been that sharp divide between them.

Megamind was an alien of the strange and unusual sort that didn't truly belong here. He was the pariah, the designated villain, the outcast. Metro Man belonged here  _despite the same status_ ; still an alien, yet one that natives were willing to accept. It had been the standard social law since that first day he'd walked into the little red building by the prison and the other children gave Megamind a wide berth. Metro Man had never bothered to challenge it. Megamind had accepted it. It had been going on for three decades now, strong and steady.

So…  _what the **hell**_?

This sudden interest felt insulting somehow. Like an aloof and stoic relative that finally begins taking part in family affairs and events - but only to impress their new mate. The effort was grudgingly accepted but you still knew the motives behind it were entirely selfish. If there wasn't that self-serving reason to do it they would maintain their distance and continue not caring whatsoever. Megamind knew Metro Man far better than to think there was no ulterior motive. He  _craved_  attention, and  _always_ got his way, and cared very little for anything else unless there was some benefit for him in it.

Yes, he was a generally nice person and hero and did lots of good things, but  _nice people can **still**  be narcissistic self-serving jerks_. It all depends on what methods they go through to get their desired reward. The fact that Metro Man craved  _positive attention_  in no way made him a good person at his core, just a person doing the necessary things to get what results he wanted. He'd been doing it since the moment he landed in his little golden pod under the Christmas Tree, the tale he had proudly told over and over again as a child to anyone that would listen, because he was her gift.

And after all that time, Megamind was a 'fellow alien' now?

No.

No  _way_  was he getting away with it that easily.

There had to be a reason. Metro Man wanted something. But what was it?

In the past couple of years Megamind had seen distinct changes in his rival. The changing color of his hair as the white appeared and expanded, an increase in aggression, and if he wasn't mistaken the man seemed to be growing  _larger_. It wasn't just his muscle mass, though that was part of it, he seemed to be growing in the way children did – his entire frame was expanding all the way down to his bones… which meant he wasn't his final adult size yet and that was just damned terrifying to think about because  _when would he stop_? His scale was already inhuman (metaphorically and literally) and much more of that would just put him even more in the category of those mythical gods from Rome that the people of this city kept modelling his statues after.

And if he was going through a growth spurt at this age… how long was his people's lifespan? It wasn't as if anything on this planet could kill him before he simply died of old age.

Megamind was well aware he was not immune to his own aging either, and this new opening on his body was just one more straw on an already heaping pile of confusion.

There hadn't been too much of a demanding pull to satisfy his sexual urges until the last six years – not until his late twenties. His body's insistence he relieve that stress was happening more frequently as those years passed. He'd been able to achieve orgasm after about fifteen (late for humans, but he didn't worry over that – he wasn't human after all) yet the actual urge to make it happen hadn't surfaced until twice that age. It was as if, for Megamind, puberty hadn't actually hit until he was almost thirty. Once again the question of lifespan came up… and the comparison with Metro Man was again similar.

More than once recently Roxanne had commented on his new cologne while they were waiting for Metro Man to arrive… but he never wore any. Even some of the more, ah, friendly inmates had asked him if he'd been smuggling spices out of the kitchens. Megamind knew his scent was changing, though he had paid it no mind. There weren't any of his own people to notice it, so why bother? It wasn't as if a rise in pheromones would do him any good.

With all of these questions and no real answers, perhaps it would be prudent to let an actual doctor with an interest in alien biology examine them both and compare. Much as he hated to admit it the brute had a point on this one. If Megamind didn't take the chance now, when would he get it again?

Whatever else was going on, one thing was clear; Metro Man wanted something.

Megamind just had to figure out what it was… then how to bait him with it like a carrot on a stick.

This new curiosity may have something to do with how their species' interacted. If this behavior was somehow instinctive, like their very different reactions to that damnable sound, then Megamind had to figure out what the nature of their species' interaction had been for clues. Were they friends? Enemies merely cooperating in a time of peril? Was one culture superior or simply have a higher level of command, or were they both more or less equal?

Their peoples had definitely interacted. Megamind had  _seen them_ , though he hadn't had the perspective at that time to know what was going on. An infant doesn't exactly have the experience to look at a situation and think,  _'these are our planetary neighbors and they are trying to help us cope due to mutual oncoming doom that we are all very aware of and unable to prevent'_. It was more along the lines of  _'those people are a different color and huge and making angry sound from their mouths and why is everyone screaming?'_ , and one had to judge events much later with the benefit of hindsight. Of course, having a stellar memory also helped… but there was still a significant difference between  _seeing_  and  _understanding_.

He had never thought to examine his earliest memories in more detail before, though that reluctance to do so may have been a bit more deliberate than he wanted to admit. Honestly he'd just been having too much fun to worry about it as an adult and as a child had been too afraid of what he would see. The memories he replayed over and over again were all close encounters of his parents. He'd not bothered to view anything else too closely.

Both Megamind's and Metro Man's worlds were gone and there was no going back to them and no stopping it. His Reset Button project had failed horribly and convinced him there was no correcting the horrors of the past. He couldn't bring their worlds, or their peoples, back. So he had tried to move forward and not let it hurt him any more than it already did. Now, though, he had no choice if he was to figure out what was going on with his enemy.

Evidence was needed here. Unfortunately, the only existing evidence in the universe was in his head and he would have to scrape every last shred of it from the experience of an infant over only 8 measly days. Even though those days had been significantly longer than the 24-hour Earth days by, Megamind guessed, roughly 2.86 times, it was still very little to go by.

To shed more light on the subject he began to pick out specific memories of Metro Man's people and how his own blue kin had reacted to them. Of course he had frequently reviewed the memories he wanted to – his parents and everything about them and anything he could take comfort in… but it was the background events he needed to concentrate on now. Not his doomed family, but what had happened around them.

And there it was. Panic. Anxiety. Sleepless, sad nights and frantic days of building his escape pod. Everyone was tense and panicked and generally irrational and violent. As they approached the Black Hole massive earthquakes wracked the planet from the gravitational pull stressing the lithosphere in unnatural ways, slowing the planet's spin still further as it only pulled to one side. Terrible weather tore across the surface for similar reasons, forcing many underground for hours while the tumult raged above them. Megamind and his kin had taken shelter this way six times.

He'd been born in one of those shelters, he realized, playing back the memory and looking beyond his father's brown eyes and grateful smile with the hazy and unfocused lenses of a newborn. Background information he had been ignoring until now screamed out at him; things he had never truly concentrated on because of how hazy the world had been to him then. Huddled blue people clad in white, some too still to merely be sleeping and surrounded by dark pools he daren't examine further littered the space. A large portion were alone, mottled with red and purple after being hit with debris on their way down. Megamind would never have guessed that was the reason as a newborn; now he knew what had caused those injuries and the still ones. It had been the storm. They hadn't been fast enough getting to the shelter. Others were more fortunate; merely blue and white blurs clutching smaller such figures, their own children, to them as fiercely as Megamind's own had held him. They had taken shelter much faster.

And then he noticed blurs of white and gold hovering above them. Why had he never noticed that detail? Perhaps they were robots like his Brain-bots? Or delivery drones of some kind to distribute supplies to those in the shelter? Whatever they were they bobbed and weaved and seemed to circle particular groups of the blobs; hovering around particular families rather than catering to everyone in general. It was odd, but more information than he'd had before.

Evidence gathered thus far; strange white hovering blurs.

Not very useful.

As he aged and his eyes began to clear Megamind could discern more things and he pulled those memories as well.

First, there were transmissions on those huge screens from the neighboring planet. Before the final days when a word he knew was some sort of final alert appeared. The peoples were speaking to one another and had a shared language and script, he knew that much. Entirely different languages tended to look and sound very unique from one another and from what Megamind heard and saw it was all too similar to be entirely separate. If Metro Man's people had a language of their own they must have been using the blue people's language as the primary method to communicate, because Megamind's own people had never switched as far as he could recall. Usually a common script and language, at least on Earth, indicated a level of interaction that made it necessary such as a shared government. Either that or one of the societies had been conquered and forced to adapt to the victor's culture. Given the differences physically it left Megamind with little doubt as to who the conquerors might have been.

He daren't dwell on that much.

The video communication with Metro Man's species had definitely not been the only contact. Megamind's father and Mother had met once with one of those people. Comparatively he had been larger than Metro Man himself and positively dwarfed Megamind's parents when he stood near them. He was covered in injuries – and WHAT had managed to injure him could have only been another of his own – and Megamind recalled how the hulking man had smiled down at him in his mother's arms.

Megamind didn't know what had been said but he assumed it was communication on the pod they were building, since it was in clear view when he landed and the man had brought them some of the crucial parts of it that he must have gathered at their request.

He seemed rather interested in Megamind, even reaching out to let the little blue hands grasp at his big fingers. Quite suddenly he was gone, though, and a loud sound much like an impact made his parents scream, and they had fled while a loud rumble made them all huddle together in fright. They fled with Megamind to an underground shelter again.

There, Megamind's focus went beyond his parents as he was trying to do, and for the first time he realized what those hovering white blobs were. His five-day-old eyes were no longer clouded and he saw them for what they were. They were children of Metro Man's people dressed in white and gold being cared for by some of the blue-skinned families and hovering around them. There were at least half a dozen. And yet the one adult that Megamind's parents had spoken to was the only one he ever saw in person until meeting Metro Man as their pods flew by each other.

At this point Megamind closed his eyes and took a breath after half a second of frantic thought and went towards the rest of the second half, wherein a lot of his conclusions came in.

That man had been helping them, defending them even, since that impact sound might have been him fighting off another of his own kind, which would clearly explain both the injuries and his sudden disappearance. That rumble had been a growl, hadn't it? Yes, he remembered even then how it made him cry and huddle closer to his parents and the way they had both jolted when they heard it.

He had been correct in his earlier guess. That sound was one that his own people had learned to fear, and Metro Mans people made it as a warning to herald when they were fighting, hopefully so that the blue people could scramble out of the way to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.

Here, Metro Man's own behavior rang in Megamind like a bell. All that growling in shool… and the sound that had made Megamind tense like a bowstring and tear through his own skin… that must have been him growling at something. Even from across town he would have heard it since his head contained cavities specifically meant to help him register that noise over long distances.

Whatever had made Metro Man growl like that had Megamind's pity… he had clearly been enraged at the time. Megamind couldn't even be angry that it had caused him to hurt himself at an embarrassing moment, because neither of them had known it was a possibility, because neither of them were aware at the time that their species had interacted so much that it had influenced their very evolution… or in this case co-evolution.

But now Megamind did.

And he considered that Metro Man might have the right to know, though he would keep the knowledge to himself just now.

HOW had they interacted though? Usually when creatures competed for similar resources, which the two peoples had inevitably done, it either resulted in one getting chased out of that area or going extinct… or they learned to work together somehow. It was quite obvious that Metro Man's people were territorial. It was entirely possible all of those flying infants had been his progeny that the blue people were looking after in exchange for him guarding them. Territorialism would also explain how effectively Metro Man looked after Metrocity – to him the city really was  _his_. The presence of the blue people within that territory indicated nothing more than the fact that they weren't enough of a bother for the boundaries to apply in terms of keeping them out… but did that mean they were to be kept in them? Having their own planet didn't necessarily mean there were no permanent residents on the blue planet, it merely meant they had hopped over and set up camp.

Megamind reeled for a moment and took on another train of thought that rushed right next to the original and matched each other for progress.

Evidence gathered so far:

Metro Man's species was territorial and lived on the blue planet as well as their own.

The peoples had interacted for so long that they had co-evolved at least enough for the blue people to recognize a warning call on a physical and instinctive level.

Megamind's people were permitted inside of those territories and were, apparently, worthy of being protected within them.

The blue people would look after their protector's children should the need arise, like babysitters.

…and aside from the frantic activity of the last three days as the situation only got worse and led up to Megamind being sent away, he recalled nothing else of significance.

The co-evolution was the most interesting part of it all.

Perhaps the peoples had a sort of symbiotic relationship akin to… what was it? Oh, yes. Clownfish and Anemones. The colorful little things lived inside the protection of the anemone's toxic limbs for safety, and in return the fish would attack the types of fish that ate the anemone. After a bit more consideration, however, Megamind had to amend that. What sort of protection could flying-brick-man possibly need from creatures like Megamind's own people? It couldn't be the sort of equal service-service function of mutual protection. Much as he hated to admit it, Megamind settled on the far more logical conclusion.

Service-Resource interaction was a lot more likely. Much like plants would produce delicious and tempting fruit in order to get animals to eat them and… erm… disperse the seeds later after they had passed through their digestive systems. Still mutually beneficial, but in a different way than equal cooperation, instead it was more of a barter system. The plant provided a resource (food) and the animals provided a service (distribution). The behavior of Metro Man's people (at least the two adults that Megamind had personally encountered) still pointed to territorial ends, so they were surely providing a service; protection.

So what resource was Megamind's species providing in return? That was the hard part to figure out.

Perhaps the strain of guarding the territory was so taxing a chore that Metro Man's people had little time to gather their own sustenance? Then again, Megamind's waif-like intelligent people didn't exactly have the body type suited to the sort of hard labor farming or hunting required, and what sort of beast or plant was a match for the sort of speed and strength Metro Man wielded?

Or perhaps there was no specific resource provided as far as symbiosis went. The situation may not have been symbiotic at all. It was entirely possible that the brutes had ulterior motives for the apparent protection. Megamind's people may have been guarded inside those territorial boundaries, but were they guarded or GUARDED? In essence; could they leave? Did the blue people provide whatever resource or service they exchanged for that safety willingly or did they have no choice? Perhaps they WERE the resource. After all, even ANTS kept captive labor. From an evolutionary standpoint it was not simply possible, it was very likely.

Certain species of ants raided other colonies, usually weaker members of the same basic evolutionary branch family, and stole their children. They then raised them under imprinting. Some were facultative parasites… they could certainly survive without their captives; it was simply easier to have them on hand. Of course raiding other colonies was both for acquiring slaves and food, which neatly put those captured in their place when they witnessed their comrades being devoured, he was sure. In other cases, this was because the raiders were obligate parasites… in other words they were literally unable to survive without their stolen broods.

Go to any colony of European Amazon ants and take away their slaves and the colony's own offspring would quickly begin to fail without the proper care. Even the adults would begin to starve. In essence the colony was composed of a mess of social parasites entirely dependent upon their stolen and indentured workforce – a race of soldiers with  _only the ability to enslave_  that had no other skill set and had no workers, farmers, and gatherers of its own to support a basic social infrastructure.

In one experiment, Megamind recalled wryly, if only the raiders were put into an area with no captives they would starve to death even with a generous supply of food nearby and not even attempt to care for their own young. Introduce even ONE slave and suddenly order was established and they began to function. Even the queens of that type of ant established her new colony via hostile takeover; she would sneak into a colony of the designated 'lesser' species, kill the queen there, and usurp. Literally the only skill set those bastards had was raiding! And they even raised their own broods and captive broods in different nurseries, too, the evil things.

The evidence didn't quite match up there either. If that was the case, why had the male Megamind's parents interacted with seemed so fond of them? Why bring them things they had asked for to help them build the escape pod?

Perhaps not social parasites after all… but brood parasites? What if only the caretaker aspect was the issue! if Metro Man's people were so busy patrolling the boundaries of the territories, how were they to care for their young? Territorial defense was a dangerous job; one couldn't exactly take their kids along for that, especially not at the levels of power those battling possessed. This would certainly explain the children hovering around the blue families! That might be it. The exchange for protection and resources available within the boundaries was that the blue people raised their guardian's offspring while they were essentially off at war. AND that explained why Megamind's family had behaved amicably toward the brutish male that had spoken to them; they were a potential surrogate family, and the brute was a guardian.

Perhaps Megamind's parents had even raised a surrogate child for him and his mate before Megamind had come along.

THAT possibility was far less nerve-wracking and a lot more pleasant. Despite all their intimidating power, Metro Man's people were just a bunch of big, needy, cuckoo birds! Hopefully without the 'eliminate the competition' bent the fledgling cuckoos often employed, but there had been a pair of children with one couple that Megamind could recall; a female blue and another male mini-metro.

And, after all those possibilities, Megamind had to admit he had a poor basis for comparison because he was trying to judge alien behavior based on how life had evolved on one little blue watery speck in a big, big, BIG universe. Some of them could have been applicable to varying degrees, but it was also entirely true that none of them could be applicable AT ALL and the reality was something he couldn't conceive of simply because he hadn't encountered that type of behavior on this planet.

Earth was a very small world and hadn't had, comparatively, a lot of time to evolve its lifeforms to more advanced stages. He had no idea how old the star the three occupied worlds of his star system had been before it collapsed in on itself, but if creatures like Metro Man had evolved it must have been quite a while indeed.

Yes… he wanted more information just as much as Metro Man did and to get it he would have to submit to this mortifying medical procedure, and he would have to provide much more of an examination than Metro Man himself was even capable of.

Resigned, he decided to allow it.

BUT-

* * *

 

"Why has it taken you so long to become interested in our respective alien biology at all? You must  _know_ we came from the same quadrant. I've  _told you that_  many times. I told you about my own escape pod and that we arrived on the same day a long time ago.  _Two decades_  ago, in fact. Why decide to be curious  _now_?" he demanded.

Blindsided, Metro Man blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

"I never wondered why  ** _you_**  were here," he snapped. "It seemed weird that  ** _I_** was here because the world felt strange around me, but it never felt like  ** _you_**  were out of place."

 ** _*Oh. Because I_** **belong _in your territory and the rest of these strange creatures_ don't _.*_**  Megamind thought immediately.  ** _*But you don't know why, do you?*_**

Now it was Megamind's turn to feel guilty. He'd had this information for the entirety of their interaction and just hadn't analyzed it and shared it with his 'fellow' alien. And he knew damned well that Metro Man didn't have his mental capabilities and likely didn't remember anything at all about his earliest days.

God damn it.

"There may be a reason for that," he admitted. "I've only just figured it out, though."

Metro Man took a step forward and looked curiously at him. "You lost your mad there, little buddy. What were you thinking about?"

"Don't call me that," Megamind argued. "But I have a deal to propose."

"I'm listening."

"I agree that we should discover as much about ourselves and our worlds as we can. We are the only surviving evidence they existed at all and even if all we can do is know it ourselves that would be doing a sort of justice to our first families," he said.

Metro Man nodded sadly. "Yeah. I mean, I know I had a family before, I just try not to think about it too much." He started and gave Megamind an apologetic look, as if he just now realized he had the same problem. "Ah. Sorry."

Megamind continued. "I will agree to go and see this Dr. Mardling on two conditions. One; we will both submit to every test she asks of us. I will not be humiliated alone."

"Yeah, ok," Metro Man agreed.

"Two; I am to be given an additional set of every piece of evidence and every set of tests results the good doctor does."

Metro Man crossed his arms. "So you can figure out how to destroy me?" he asked wryly.

"I've known how to destroy you since I was an infant, Metro Man. A Black Hole will do the trick because I've seen it work on both of our worlds and peoples. Besides… if I killed you I wouldn't have anything left to play with, now would I? You and Miss Ritchie both," Megamind said with all his usual villainous flair. "Call it cat-and-mouse syndrome if you will. It just wouldn't be very smart to break my favorite toys."

Metro Man gaped at him, then laughed after deciding being offended would be pointless. "That is the most convoluted, irritating, and twisted logic I've ever heard. But I'll be dag-nabbed if it doesn't make sense.

"Who taught you to swear?" Megamind asked flatly. "I'd like to kill them."

Metro Man chuckled and held out one fringe-gloved hand. "I'll ask Dr. Mardling when she has an opening for us. Will you let me take you back, or are you going to call Minion?"

Megamind rolled his eyes and let out a suffering groan, but took the offered hand.

He tried to ignore that it was larger than he remembered.


	5. Superfluous Plans

Superfluous Plans

"I will constantly have several useful, but superfluous plans in motion, with much less security than my actual plans. If they succeed I shall turn a profit, if not then the hero has just wasted valuable time stopping them." ~TV Tropes Additional Evil Overlord Vows #17

* * *

 

Dr. Mardling had been buzzing with excitement since Metro Man had called on her last night.

Her Grandfather would have given  _anything_  for the chance she had now, and she was only sad that he hadn't lived the fifteen extra years he would have needed to experience it. Being fifty herself she was glad that she had lived long enough to see this moment, and that she'd been born in the right time, in the right place, to have the opportunity to begin with.

 _Two_  aliens, from  _the same solar system_  who wanted more information about themselves were essentially  _up for show-and-tell!_  And one of them was a supervillain that had actually agreed to  _behave for it_  and  ** _contribute_**  out of mutual curiosity! This was far more than a golden opportunity, because gold was a very common substance, all things considered. It was an  ** _astatine_**  opportunity and she was damn well going to cancel every single important-to-vital thing in her datebook until the chance degraded into mere bismuth or radon… and she should really get her mind off the damn periodic table of elements and back to the task at hand.

She arrived at her new base of operations three hours early, practically hissing with energy. The outside of the Metro Man Museum was essentially complete in all its shining glory, though the inside was still being finished and the globe had yet to be gold leafed due to the cold. Her office was complete, though, and she had already begun accepting a certain patient there because it was his damned building (and if you don't think being the resident Superhero's personal physician didn't come with a massive tax break… you didn't know the obsessive/compulsiveness of Metro City).

Halfway there from the car she stopped mid-stride and grumbled at the figure sitting on the somewhat sheltered and salted portion of the steps leading up the new museum. He was puffing out steam as he muttered to himself over the edge of his scarf, fiddling with his phone and pointedly not looking up at her. She grumbled, stomped a few layers of snow off her boots, and carried on.

Dr. Mardling had been working with Bernard for three years. Their odd friendship… rivalry… _frivalry_  thing had begun when the city had started searching for experts to help fill up the museum they planned to honor their hero. They had chosen two people to spearhead the operation; Bernard for the expert on Villain Psychology, his ability to Archive like a manic monk from the dark ages, and previous experience as a Curator, from which he had been fired for verbally abusing guests that failed to understand what 'Do Not Touch the Exhibits' meant. Dr. Mardling had been chosen as the Exobiologist, Co-curator, Super-Power Theorist, and because she was the only living person that had examined Metro Man directly. Technically she was in charge of the whole operation, being the Metro Man expert at the Metro Man Museum and all… but Bernard never accepted his position as her Co-Curator and Assistant and had done a marvelous job on his end of the whole thing to the point where she grudgingly accepted that his obsession with the criminal mind was a marvel in and of itself.

Being that they had quite opposing fields and viewpoints on many things, a rivalry between the fifty-year-old woman and the mid-thirties man had sprung up immediately. They had an unspoken, long-standing agreement that whoever arrived last was late  _no matter what time it was_ and was buying the coffee. Over time that had devolved into making the coffee instead, due to the rising cost of the damned coffee shops near the impending tourist trap they currently worked in. Despite his usual sour expression, the fact that he was even here this early told her a lot. He was just as excited about this opportunity as she was.

And he had even brought coffee despite winning the race.

Smiling and shaking her head wryly, Dr. Mardling walked up to him and kicked his foot gently. "Come on. We need to set up for a hell of a morning." After keying in her code she held open the door and nodded toward it while the man… continued to sit on the steps and fiddle with his phone, texting to whom she hadn't a clue. He ignored her. She stomped her foot. " _Bern_ , the first three letters of assistant spell 'ass', so please get off yours."

"There's two in assassin," he drawled back at her.

"Yeah, there's also an 'in'. Can you handle that or do I need to get my gloves?"

He snorted once, but rose from his place on the stairs and followed her in, not looking up once. "You don't scare me, woman," he informed her blithely after finishing his text.

As soon as he turned around to walk past her into the building, she took a blue vinyl glove out of her pocket, stretched it out, and snapped him on the back of the neck. His offended howl echoed in the Villain Wing's entrance hall.

"Why do I work with you?" he wondered aloud.

"Because nobody else will put up with you," she snapped, shaking her finger. "And pissing you off is the only time I ever hear emotion in your voice."

Dr. Mardling had mostly created the Hero Wing. It had been Dr. Mardling that put together the model of a section of Metro Man's DNA, wrote essays documenting her theories on how his powers functioned and which ones he had, and had gone so far as to be sure his statues and depictions were as anatomically accurate as possible. She had played a heavy hand in editing and writing his documentaries and theorizing that his people had visited Earth before, spawning the legends of Hercules, Achilles, Perseus, Karna, Atalanta, and even Beowulf.

Admittedly, though, she was so concerned with accuracy and fact that her pursuit of it had left her with little erm…  _stuff_  to fill the Hero Wing with. As a result of this there was enough room in it for a Library and Gift shop, a model of the Minotaur's Labyrinth, and a Hall of Heroes of which Metro Man was only a current member of.

Bernard had created Villain Wing.

And he was good at the  _stuff_  aspect. That was significantly assisted by the fact that Megamind was quite a prolific inventor, and Metro Man had a tendency to keep things he found interesting for a while. The Villain Wing was  _packed_ with this stuff; statues of Megamind and Metro Man fighting, massive numbers of newspaper clips from capers and stories and pictures of them, HUGE robots on the second floor, smaller but far more numerous robots on the top floor, a lot of weaponry that had been taken from the villain on display, a cinema of equal glory as the one where Metro Man's documentaries were shown that ran documentaries of Megamind, and hilariously enough only one floor dedicated to the rest of the villains of the city. The Doom Syndicate didn't even get the whole floor to themselves; they shared it with mass murderers and prolific burglars and extortionists of the very ordinary kind, whereas the rest of the entire Villain Wing was chock full of Megamind.

Even the Hero Wing had caught some of the spillover. To add insult to injury he had even commissioned an aquarium for the gift shop that  _featured_   _piranhas as a tribute to Minion_.

The man definitely put the ass in assistant.

But he still had a  _point._

It was annoying, but disturbingly true that the public was always more fascinated by villains than heroes. Sure they  _celebrated_  the heroes, but the people they couldn't stop discussing online at the end of the day were the ones that were dark and dangerous and  _interesting._  The building wasn't even open yet and she'd figured it out already; Metro City had accidentally made a  _Megamind Museum_ … and then put an enormous statue of Metro Man in the middle and prayed the hero wouldn't notice.

Bernard handed her coffee and snorted. Their offices were in the appropriate wings, of course, and Bernard's was actually much smaller given that he'd needed more room for his extensive collection of spiked and blue lightning embossed memorabilia.

She shook her head and smiled indulgently at him. "Get anything you need and meet me in twenty. I'll set up for the exams. Metro Man will be bringing Megamind at seven at the front."

With that they separated and went to do their own things, but both of them were high on adrenalin despite outward appearances on Bernard's part. They had some willing aliens to inspect and interview.

* * *

 

It was now seven thirty.

The invisible car parked right next to a parking meter near the back, then Megamind stepped out and fiddled with it until it was stuck in 'paid'. He then deactivated the invisibility so that nobody would inadvertently try to park there while the space was already occupied, because an unoccupied paid parking meter in Metrocity shone like a beacon in Death Valley at midnight. It wasn't a big worry since the building was still being put together on the inside, today was a holiday so nobody was going to be here aside from the woman he had an appointment with, and it was at least a solid season until the scheduled opening ceremony. Nothing was  _impossible_ , however, and Megamind was already on Minion's bad side for agreeing to come here in the first place; damaging the car would have made him even sulkier since the fish drove it more often than Megamind himself did.

The fish had a terrible fear of either of them being torn open for study and Megamind didn't blame him in the slightest. As a sort of protest to the event Minion had refused to come, telling Megamind that if he got put in several different jars and wound up satisfying someone else's curiosity and not just his own it would serve him right. Of course Megamind pretended not to notice the Brain-bot hovering nearby, because Minion was of course going to look after him anyway, bless him.

Megamind's current state of dress was for the sake of convenience. To get into his marvelously showy villain clothes he usually had to have help. Either Minion or the Brain-bots assisted for many reasons – clasps and zippers in odd places since it was impossible for him to pull anything with a closed neck over his head, the difficulties involved in what materials he preferred to wear having very little give in terms of stretching, etcetera. Obviously he would have to disrobe at some point for a thorough medical exam and coming alone meant he had to undress and redress himself. In order to just get through the experience with as little stress as possible he had worn a simple black button-up and jeans; things he could get on and off himself with little trouble. They would just have to put up with his leather jacket and boots, though, and the heating system in both that was keeping him relatively comfortable.

Metro Man had resolved to come and get him for the appointment and despite Megamind's insistence that he could  _drive himself, damn it,_  the brute had insisted on pressing the matter because he had promised to make sure Megamind's fear of being dissected was unfounded. The blue man agreed just to make him leave, then proceeded to call in a favor and drive anyway while Metro Man was distracted thwarting an imaginary bomb hunt. The bomb itself wasn't imaginary, but the threat was considering Megamind had requested it be full of blue and black confetti and lollipops with the word 'SUCKER' written on the wrappers.

He couldn't wait to see the look on the idiot's face when he finally got here.

Undeterred by the security system, Megamind simply broke in and made his way to the lobby of the villain wing, which he was instantly impressed by. Whoever had put it together did a pretty good job of it, especially since he didn't see any evidence that another villain even existed besides himself. Perhaps eventually the Doom Syndicate and the other riff-raff would realize the power of showmanship and he looked forward to the challenge of showing them up, but in the meantime it was nice to know he was doing his job well.

"Who're you?" an eerily blank voice echoed from behind him. Megamind took the lollipop he'd opened upon entering the building out of his mouth and turned to behold a bespectacled brown-haired man he could only assume worked here.

"Someone with better things to do than work on this fine wintry holiday," Megamind quipped. "Go home and I'll refrain from doing horrible things to you."

"I'm the Archivist here and-"

"Oh, you  _are_? Did you help with this wing?" Megamind asked pleasantly, gesturing around him with the candy before putting it back in his mouth.

"Yes, and-"

"Well done!" Megamind patted the man's shoulder hard enough to make him stumble. "I can only hope you didn't forget the older versions of Minion's suit. It'd be good to have them all in one place for easy retrieval later. Of course you'll probably consider it stealing but I DID make them, and all."

The glib archivist was thoroughly unimpressed. He straightened up, pushed his glasses further up his nose, and pointed to the door. "The museum is closed today to everyone, including workers and loonies trying to show off enough to get jobs. I don't have time for Megamind auditions and you're not even in costume."

Megamind was so surprised he gaped until the candy fell out and hit the floor.  _"A… auditions!?"_

"We've already been stood up by two clients today, so if you would please leave," he continued. Incensed, Megamind took out his DE-GUN and turned the dial. The archivist, apparently suicidal,  _kept going_. "And you even have a cheap replica of the dehydration gun. How-"

Megamind pulled the trigger and considered, quite strongly, stepping on the blue cube on the floor. At the density it now possessed it was highly unlikely he would break it, but it would make him feel better. Of all the nerve! No, he wasn't in top form today, but how could he be expected to maintain perfect form at all times? Even the best in the business had sick days, for pity's sake! He picked up the cube and glared at it, wishing those that were dehydrated could have been aware of their surroundings so he could yell at the man for being stupid.

Which was, of course, the moment Metro Man arrived; in costume, sporting confetti in his hair, and seething. Metro Man snatched the gun and tried to hold it up out of Megamind's reach, but since Megamind didn't let go he wound up holding the gun in the air while the blue man dangled off of it and grinned smugly at him at eye-level. Since Megamind hadn't been there to do anything evil at the time the bomb wasn't considered a victory so much as a successful prank, so Metro Man couldn't retaliate for it without consequences. He noticeably said nothing about it whatsoever.

"You promised  _no weapons_!" he said darkly.

"I promised no LETHAL weapons," Megamind corrected, continuing to hold on with one hand while using his left to politely pick some of the bits of paper out of his enemies' hair. "All I did was dehydrate the man, don't make such a fuss. Though I'll agree to let you have the DE-GUN for the rest of the appointment if you revive him in the toilet."

"No!" Metro Man snapped, and shook the gun until Megamind rolled his eyes and let go of it.

"You're no fun," Megamind sighed. He reluctantly handed the cube over, turned, and proceeded to the stairs. "Let's get this over with."

* * *

 

After reviving Bernard, who gave Megamind offended looks but thankfully did nothing to retaliate, Megamind took control of the initial interview pretty quickly. This was helpful because as it turns out he actually knew what the hell he was talking about and it was clear after the first few minutes even Metro Man was riveted by what he was saying. Both Dr. Mardling and Bernard were recording everything from several different angles and had already promised the villain they weren't to share anything from this entire process with absolutely anyone without his permission, on pain of pain.

Megamind had spent the first hour discussing the three inhabited planets in the solar system they had come from in excellent detail considering how much of them Megamind had actually seen. Both humans got the impression that Megamind wasn't sharing everything he knew but ignored it for the moment in favor of gathering all the evidence they possibly could. He had even drawn them a model of how he thought the solar system might have looked before the eventual, terrible, Black Hole thing had thrown the whole place inward on itself. He had offered to make them an orrery on one condition that he had yet to divulge, and since Metro Man hadn't argued the point they had let it go for the moment.

From there the discussion had turned to their obvious physical differences, which were already very well-known.

Then the  _similarities_  had come up, at which point the entire atmosphere had changed in a way ¾ of those present could never have anticipated.

"We  _are_  similar in many ways," Megamind admitted.

Metro Man sighed. "Just coming from the same solar system probably doesn't count for much though."

Dr. Mardling laughed. "In a universe this big? It certainly does. We already know your planets communicated."

"Well, Metro Man doesn't have your brain power, THAT'S for sure," the Bernard drawled, speaking to the alien he was most interested in.

Startled, Megamind put his cup down. "Yes he does."

"What?" Metro Man asked, just as surprised as the two humans currently looking between them curiously. "No I don't. You call me an idiot constantly."

"Because you  _are_ an idiot," the blue man argued. "But we do have similar  _brains_. They know this." Megamind began to gesture to Bernard and Dr. Mardling, only to pause at their perplexed looks. "You…  _don't_  know this?" he trailed off uncertainly. The silence around him positively chafed until he groaned and threw up his hands in exasperation. "Really?" Megamind asked, affronted. "No one here has figured that out? It's so obvious! Unless he can teleport or manipulate time there's no other way he'd be able to zip from place-to-place without super-speed!"

"Of course he has super-speed," Bernard drawled flatly. "What does that have to do with brain power?"

"I will explain if you don't interrupt me," he demanded flatly.

They all quickly agreed and the blue man paused to get a second cup of coffee.

"Think of a brain in terms of a computer," he began. "My computer is very similar in make and model to the one Metro Man possesses, but each computer has a different purpose depending on the needs of the body its controlling. This makes me vastly more intelligent than Metro Man because I have  _no other need_  for all that processing power; it's all for analysis and thought and memory and  _nothing else_. Meanwhile, Metro Man, your brain has a different function entirely."

"Which is?" the her prompted while Megamind put a few more cubes of sugar in his coffee and stirred it.

"If you'll forgive my  _guess_ ," the blue man said in the most irritating 'I-Know-I'm-Right' tone he could manage,", when you use that super-speed ability it doesn't feel like you are moving any faster, does it? To you it's as if the world around you is  _slowing down_."

"Hey!" Metro Man gaped. "Yeah."

Megamind nodded once. "There are only two ways for that effect to work. One is that you are actually manipulating your place in the flow of time, and I'm quite pleased to inform you that is very much NOT one of your powers. The other is that you are simply  _thinking at the same velocity you are moving at_. If you didn't have that sort of processing power in your brain OR the ability to manipulate time, and only super-speed on a physical level… well, imagine having a normal perception of time at the speeds you can achieve, Metro Man." Megamind was pleased when the man winced.

"Oh," Metro Man said warily.

"Right," the blue man nodded approvingly. "You wouldn't even know what had hit you by the time you  _blundered into it_ ; walls, vehicles, buildings, mountains… you wouldn't be able to  _think fast enough_  to see what was happening right in front of you, react to them, or control your powers during those moments. Where super-speed is concerned, believe me; your brain has to run  _very fast_  in order for the rest of the world to sit still."

"So in terms of function the biggest difference is that your processor is pretty much stuck at maximum without the ability to move that fast physically, and Metro Man's is connected to the speed his body is currently using," the Doctor mused. "Theoretically Metro Man  _could_ think as fast as you do, but only while his super-speed is active, and from his perspective he would be spending weeks at a time surrounded by a snapshot of the world around him to get a couple of seconds worth of your results."

"Precisely," Megamind agreed. "Our brains are quite similar in actual processing power; but you can either be super-smart OR super-fast, but never both. One brain wouldn't be able to handle that much  _work_. So for reference, Metro Man?" the villain teased. "I can think about as fast as you can move."

Dr. Mardling beamed at him. "Can I use that in my theories?"

Megamind shrugged. "I'm surprised you didn't know it already. Why not?"

Bernard grunted. "Then why is your head so much bigger than his if you have essentially the same nuts and bolts in there? Isn't your brain bigger?"

"Not by much, no," Megamind admitted. "My head is bigger because of the empty pockets in it – resonating chambers that improve my ability to hear over very long distances." He paused and shrugged. "But only certain sounds. They have to trigger the resonance, after all."

Bernard raised a brow. "Megamind, do you perceive the world in a similar way to the slowing down Metro Man sees during super-speed?"

"No, I just get bored very easily," the blue man huffed. "Which just made shool torture."

"What do you mean?" Metro Man asked.

Megamind laughed humorlessly. "Have you ever accidentally tried talking to those silent statues around you while your speed was still in effect?"

Metro Man nodded. "Yeah. They can't answer because their entire world is moving at a different level."

"Congratulations; you know what it feels like to be me," Megamind dead-panned.

"Can you explain that in more detail?" Dr. Mardling asked.

Megamind continued talking to Metro Man as if he had been the one to ask him that question. "Do you remember that ludicrous woman that taught in the little red shool house? Every morning we would all sit there and be forced to count to one hundred; a no doubt useful exercise for you and the denizens of this world, but for  _me_? Imagine that in terms of your super-speed." Megamind drawled. "I was dully reciting in the millions in my head while everyone around me hadn't gotten to the 'n' in one yet. And I  _can't shut that off_. It's like talking to statues all the time," he complained.

Metro Man looked pale. "That's… WOW." He collapsed back into his chair looking thoroughly weirded out.

As much as Megamind hated admitting it he did  _not_  envy Metro Man the creeping horror he clearly had at the thought of being stuck in super-speed mode. Perhaps that had been a bit too mean? He had to acknowledge that the brute seemed to implicitly understand how that felt, so perhaps he'd give the guy a break on this one. Megamind sighed and admitted, "Alright, I can shut it off upon occasion. But it never lasts for long and it's certainly not easy to achieve."

"Really?" Metro Man asked, clearly relieved.

Dr. Mardling looked up from her paper in interest. "How do you manage it?"

" **No** , I'm not about to tell you how to turn off my brain, thank you," he chided, embarrassed enough that he'd even admitted it was possible without revealing the exact circumstances. "Enough about me for the moment, tell me something about you, Metro Man. We are here to share information, after all."

The man rubbed his neck and seemed to stall. "I don't have anything interesting like the stuff you can remember about our worlds."

"I disagree," Megamind countered, giving the woman across from them a questioning look. "He's still growing, isn't he? I noticed yesterday that his hands are larger than I remember them just weeks ago."

"Metro Man  **is** still growing," Dr. Mardling confirmed. "It's been happening in stages for a long time – spurts like humans have with pauses in between. This last pause lasted for about ten years before he started showing signs of another spurt. I'm guessing he's either at the end of adolescence and this is his last big growth spurt, or his species just keeps growing indeterminately unless environmental factors prevent it. Since his hair is turning white from age or stress I'm guessing the latter is the more likely."

"White hair is a sign of advanced age for  _human beings_ , but even different members of the same basic primate family have hair that turns white for different reasons," Megamind interrupted crossly. "Male Gorillas are called silverbacks for a reason – the silver is just a color that appears to indicate when they're fully mature, not as a result of getting old. If even creatures within your own genus that are between 95 and 98 percent similar in terms of DNA have such a drastically different reason for that color change, then you can't possibly rule it out for Metro Man either."

"What evidence do you have for this?" she asked with interest.

"I  _remember_ ," Megamind said flatly. "My first days of life when we were still on our respective home worlds. I'm not sure if they were immigrants or not, or even why they were there, but I have seen a total of nine individuals of Metro Man's species. Most were very young – infants and toddlers. As I assume Metro Man is in the advanced stages of adolescence and not quite an adult yet, that means I have only seen a grand total of  **one**  of his people fully mature." Metro man pointed to his enemies' head and indicated the mere streaks. "That adult's hair was fully white. All of it, including the hair on his body. He did not look ancient in the slightest."

Though the conversation carried on well past noon after that, Metro Man and Megamind seemed to have reached a silent agreement not to mention the speaker, the growling, or that it somehow effected them both. That was something they'd work out for themselves.

Then came the time for the actual physical exams, for which Bernard took his leave to transcript the interview. Megamind carried on a pleasant and pointless conversation with the good doctor while she prepared the tools of her trade and waited until the last possible irritating moment to spring his trap.

As she began to wrap his arm and try to locate an appropriate vein he snatched his arm away.

"No," Megamind stated flatly.

Metro Man frowned at him disapprovingly. Of course he assumed this was a possibility but it frustrated him to no end that Megamind was pulling it. Of course Megamind was going to give her the samples simply because he had agreed to come here, but he knew a setup when he saw it and just had to wait and see what the villain was up to.

"I thought you wanted to gather as much information as possible," she complained. "It's only four vials."

"I agreed to go through this ridiculous EX-am-INATE-ion on the grounds that that Metro Man has to go through all of the same humiliations I do. If you aren't collecting his blood then you can't have mine. Not in the deal."

"Megamind, please be reasonable," she said, but put everything down. "It's not that I don't want to get blood samples from Metro Man; I can't. I don't even know how that would be possible."

That was when, for the first time in days, Megamind grinned a smug, villainous, anticipatory grin. "I do."

"Really!?" the doctor squeaked excitedly.

Metro Man groaned and palmed his face. "Aw,  _butter brittle_."

"And just so he is honor-bound to allow it, I shall generously go first," Megamind said courteously displaying his arm again.

"Before you actually tell us how it's going to work on me, right?" Metro Man drawled.

"Of course."

"This is for setting foot in your lair, isn't it?"

"Nonsense! That was a trifling thing, for which I shall get revAHnge at a later date. THIS is for something else entirely," Megamind ignored the doctor completely while she got the vials before he decided to argue again.

Metro Man grumbled, but relented. He couldn't resist correcting "Revenge," though.

It took him only two hours to assemble the thing, after he had returned to the car out back to bring in the tools and components he had brought with him. Megamind had, of course, planned for this and begun putting together his latest invention the second after calling in the festive prank. All he needed to do now was connect the more intricate bits… which was going to be complicated considering the forces involved in actually injuring Metro Man.

There was only one thing Megamind was positive could do that, so he had gone for broke and run with it.

Metro Man was adamant that Megamind not leave the office without supervision until the promised complete procedure was done, and Megamind agreed if only because the brute deserved to be humiliated too. Bernard followed Megamind out to the car and wound up carrying most of the weight back, griping the whole time about how he had archiving to do. While they waited for Megamind to finish building the tool that would allow the first sample of Metro Man's blood ever, Dr. Mardling and Metro Man retreated to the actual examination room to get the rest of it done. It took longer than Megamind anticipated and he wondered what they could possibly be doing, then he imagined her trying to make his leg pop up by hitting his knees with those little hammers when a wrecking ball wouldn't have done it and laughed to himself.

Bernard had taken to transcribing the interviews at Dr. Mardling's desk in the sitting room where Megamind was working, and raised a brow at him. "What's so funny?"

"That I am actually going to make my enemy bleed today," Megamind quipped. "What are they doing back there?"

"Dr. Mardling went to her office a little while ago," Bernard drawled. "The exam is probably complete, aside from fluid samples."

Dr. Mardling walked in writing things on her clipboard and muttering things to herself to help remember it until it was down on paper, and Megamind scoffed while he fastened another spike on the device he had finished a while ago. Now he was just decorating it. "It cannot be taking this long for him to pee in a cup," he said humorlessly.

Dr. Mardling blinked and looked up. "Oh, no, we already got that. He's providing a semen sample. It's the only way I can get adequate examples of his DNA to help compare with yours. On the plus side a few vials of blood will help immensely with my research! Thanks so much for-" she paused and watched with a little concern while Megamind banged his head down on the table repeatedly. "Oh… He didn't tell you that part, did he?" she laughed. "Well, you did promise you'd both do all the same tests, and you went first on the blood sample. Turnabout is fair play."

" _How many_  vials of blood did you say you need from him?" Megamind asked her malevolently.

"I'll answer that question only after you tell me if I can borrow that thing," she said, motioning toward the gun. "I don't want to have this opportunity only once. What if I need more later and you're not in such a helpful mood?"

"Madam, you may have this one to  _keep_ ," Megamind seethed. "I'll make my own."

"Great!" she chirped. "But you can make it six vials, if it'll make you feel better."

"Gladly," he agreed.

Metro Man had turned Megamind's own ploy around and condemned him to provide a sample of his sexual fluids,  **damn him**! Sure, he wasn't precisely going to be forced to, but they were Megamind's rules and he was going to follow them or Metro Man would have  _won_ , and that was not going to happen. Still, immediate comeuppance was justly deserved.

Dr. Mardling watched, brown eyes sparkling with fascination while he worked with deft blue fingers on hastily adjusting the rather burly-looking thing he had assembled. Megamind saw no reason to dissuade her from doing this if only because no human could possibly fully understand what he was doing (not to discredit them, of course – they were clever things for the mental capacity they possessed, Miss Ritchi especially) and she couldn't possibly have duplicated his work. Once Metro Man came back from his own task he merely looked on with suspicion and stayed near the good doctor as if preparing to shield her from a blast, or just to keep her from leaning in far enough to get her hair caught in the soldering.

Megamind ignored them both, too giddy over this chance to care, and he was accustomed to Minion's interested hovering anyway so he had experience not singing anyone nearby. God, but the fur on Minion's robotic body smelled awful when it burned.

Dr. Mardling wanted a blood sample from Metro Man, and she would get one. Megamind might not be able to sneak out a sample of his own without getting caught, but he could always steal a small portion of what she had been given later, as his own tests would take far less of the stuff to perform, and could always obtain the results of the doctor's own tests because he had been promised them. If he gave her a somewhat larger sample than she had asked for on the basis of 'better safe than sorry' then all the better; even Metro Man wouldn't begrudge her a little extra, especially if it kept him from needing to do this again in the future.

And the brute didn't need to know Megamind had promised to give Dr. Mardling this invention, at least not until his next yearly checkup. Megamind was going to have to keep track of that, so he could see the reaction Metro Man had when she pulled it out.

At last he had it done and mentally preened as he held it up for their inspection. It had taken a lot of work to get the simple concept to function, and there were a few reasons for it.

First; Metro Man healed incredibly quickly. While this was good for him, it was also bad for science because making him bleed was exceptionally difficult. As far as Megamind knew there were only two ways to injure the hero. First, to have him fight another of his own kind, which clearly wasn't an option. Second, to chuck him in a black hole; this had clearly, blatantly worked on the rest of the population of Metro Man's home world. The trick in this situation wasn't to destroy Metro Man, but to injure him only  _a tiny bit_ , so the black hole was out of the question… unless it was exceptionally small.

It really had to do with simple reasoning. If Metro Man healed at a rate that made any injury he might sustain close so quickly that his blood didn't even have time to escape the wound, then the logical thing to do was create a wound that couldn't close. The wound would have to be continually created (and maintained) at a speed that either equaled or exceeded the healing speed of the flesh around it.

Basically: hurt him faster than he can heal, and he will bleed.

Actually pulling that off, however, was the finicky part, because the second problem with obtaining a blood sample from the brute was that he would have to sit still and allow it to happen in the first place; a possibility that had never before been presented. And now Metro Man had actually promised to do so. There was no way in hell Megamind was passing THAT up.

Speed combined with power on a small scale was the problem here.

He'd heard once that it was estimated with currently achievable magnetic field strengths it would take a ring accelerator 1000 light years in diameter to keep particles on track and produce a small black hole by slamming them together within the distance of a Planck length. Megamind appreciated that estimation because it was astoundingly accurate for human calculations, though still several light years off the mark. That estimation was based off of current human technology, though.

Megamind had achieved the same thing within a twelve-inch diameter at the very base of the gun.

"…is that a miniature Particle accelerator?" Dr. Mardling asked incredulously.

"Okay, so how does this thing work?" Metro Man demanded.

"Not telling," Megamind said. "You wouldn't let me use it, and anyway I don't think you'd actually understand the intricacies of-"

"It makes a really, really tiny black hole," Bernard drawled.

"…yes, actually. It does," Megamind allowed, casting the man a mildly impressed look.

While Metro Man spluttered indignantly at them, Dr. Mardling lifted a brow. "Won't that suck up the blood?"

"Do you really want me to explain it?" Megamind asked.

"No, not really – as long as it works and causes no harm to my patient," she admitted. "Are you OK with this Metro Man?"

There was a moment when the two glared at each other, then Metro Man grinned. Megamind frowned. Of course the man had decided this was less humiliating than what Megamind would have to do to fulfill his end of their bargain and would allow it.

He didn't know that last gamble had prompted Megamind to adjust it in a way that would cause more pain than was strictly necessary, but he wasn't about to share that knowledge. Ever.

While Dr. Mardling pointlessly prepared Metro Man's arm by sanitizing the point of the draw, Megamind smirked and hefted the new 'weapon' in both hands. "I wish Miss Ritchi were here to watch you squirm."

"She'd probably love that, actually." Metro Man shrugged. "Roxanne can be a little difficult."

"Miss Ritchi is many things, but not difficult. You just need to get to know her," Megamind argued.

Bernard snorted. "Warms up a little?"

Megamind laughed. "No, but you get a better sense of when to dodge."

Metro Man couldn't help chortling a bit at that. Dr. Mardling took out her pen after feeling along Metro Man's arm for exactly the right spot and marked it with a little pinprick of ink. "Okay, that's where you should aim."

With clear satisfaction, Megamind did so.

For someone with practically zero experience with pain, Metro Man did surprisingly well sitting still despite having the blood draw require he essentially experience the moment of a needle sticking him continually over several minutes. Eventually, though, six vials were filled with the hero's blood and the only evidence a wound had been formed at all was a spot that looked like a particularly angry mosquito bite for about thirty seconds once the gun was withdrawn.

Dr. Mardling was so giddy over the vials that she missed the decidedly mad glares Megamind was smugly basking in from the hero, though he stopped and looked away when the woman welcomed Megamind back to the examination room for his turn.

* * *

 

 ** _*Oh, God I can_** **smell _him,*_**  Megamind thought frantically as he entered the room.

If there had been any other examination room in the entire building Megamind would have demanded they move. As it was he just hoped he could concentrate through the sensory evidence that Metro Man had released an awful lot of pheromones in this room not long ago and that they made Megamind a bit dizzy and uncertain if he wanted to stay here because it actually smelled somewhat interesting or just bolt and never come back to that spot again. The terror that growl had instilled in him echoed in his mind for a moment and he had to close his eyes and will himself to stay where he was.

"You look nervous," Dr. Mardling said kindly. "Is something bothering you?"

Megamind sighed theatrically and took the gown she gave him, walking behind the screen to put it on. "Did Metro Man tell you why he insisted on inviting me here?" He grinned a bit as he practically felt the woman's confusion in the room. Of course he didn't.

"I thought you were the one that made the offer, but then he never directly said that," she mused.

"Oh, I can tell you. It's because he was misusing his powers and noticed our insides were quite similar," Megamind informed her. "And after having it proved quite conclusively to me that x-ray vision knows no personal boundaries, I'm somewhat reluctant to give you a semen sample when one of the people in this office can see and hear though walls."

She laughed and went about preparing the tools she needed. "And I suppose you're going to claim he didn't think you were hurt at the time and was just checking to make sure you'd be ok?"

"Well argued, I must say," he agreed. "And yes he did, but it's an interesting story. One which I'd prefer to relay before you before we get to anything past this gown." A moment later he emerged and took his place on the examination table.

"Alright, I'm listening," she agreed.

He relayed what he was willing to while she checked his blood pressure, reflexes, eyes and ears, and other such things most didn't need to undress for. This he was perfectly accustomed to; prisons had physicians and his had even called in a pediatrician from time to time when he was much younger. It was when he got to the bit he knew was important, the incident that led to discovering his body's hidden tunnel, that she sat back and listened raptly. That disturbed him for reasons he couldn't name. He had expected questions, explanations and theories, and even immediate requests to poke at him. Instead;

"How does that make you feel?"

"That's not the reaction I was expecting," he admitted, regarding her with equal care. "Aren't you a scientist? An alien expert?"

"I'm also a doctor who respects my patients and their feelings, and I know what it's like to not know things about my own body," the woman said gently. She took off her reading glasses and set them down on the table beside her, and crossed her hands in her lap. "Why don't you tell me what you've discovered and what your experiences are, and then I'll tell you a story when you're done."

And that was just so unexpectedly polite and helpful that Megamind couldn't refuse her. Yes he was going to let her examine him, but it was quite a relief to know he wasn't just an alien specimen to her.

Wayne tried not to listen. He really, truly did. He focused on the traffic outside, on the city so he could catch cries for help, looked in on his parents, and even tried watching the movie in the theater about half a mile away. All of those things he could see and hear clearly.

Nothing, however, could drown out the conversation that Dr. Mardling was having with Megamind back there. He was too interested and anxious over the whole thing and it was like being five again and being lectured to resist looking through the Christmas presents. He just couldn't do it.

The most surprising part of the whole thing was that Megamind was listening. His heart was beating too fast for Wayne's liking, but he wasn't threatening or arguing or even interrupting; not even when she switched to the part of the explanation meant specifically for every other patient that had suffered sexual confusion in their lives.

She started to convince him as best she could that none of this was in any way his fault, that there was nothing wrong with him, that he had every right to be angry and hurt and resentful that he hadn't known any of this - though in his case it was in no way his parents' or the world's fault either- but he shouldn't let those feelings define him in any way. His gender, unknown or even undiscovered as it might be, was only one part of who Megamind was as a person, not all of it. Discovering more about it wouldn't change who he had been or was going to be after they knew more about his physiology and feelings about it, and discovering more about how his body worked would only add to his character, not remove anything from it.

He was still Megamind.

And as the nervous trembles started to subside and the blue being's heart rate began to even out, it occurred to Wayne with gut-wrenching force that all of those things hadn't even occurred to him as problems. Wayne had pushed for this, thinking that Vanessa would be able to help Megs calm down and get him to stop fretting over being an alien, just generally different than everyone else on this planet, when the whole time that hadn't been the problem AT ALL. Megamind knew he was an alien and had come to terms with that a long, long time ago. Not once had Wayne considered being told something like this might throw his fellow alien into a full-blown identity crisis because he had, in an entirely literal way, been raised thinking he was a gender he quite simply may not be.

Then, to his astonishment, she told Megamind a story. Every sense he had verified it was the truth; her heartbeat was even and unhurried and there was no sign or scent of stress.

"I was raised in a very… traditional family, shall we say?" she started. "The most I ever learned from my parents regarding my own body was saying that I was a girl and I'd figure it out when I got married. I was never given even the most basic of advice or preparation, because they seemed to believe that knowing what my body was for and could do would set off a chain reaction of rebellion. The family policy was basically that sex… did not exist until you said, 'I do.' So… when I got my first period at eleven I literally thought I was dying. There were no classes in school for sexual education where I grew up and nobody had ever told me what a period  _was_ , so I assumed I was hurt because that's what blood obviously means. I let it go on for two days of terror, panic, and pain, before finally going to the school nurse begging to be sent to the hospital because I thought my insides were melting. The poor school nurse, a very nice young man who couldn't believe I hadn't been told about periods, had to sit me down and explain it. And then my parents yelled at him for explaining it and tried to get him fired."

Megamind gaped. "You can't be serious!"

"My point is," she said firmly, "If nobody is either willing or available to tell you about this stuff how are you supposed to know!? Even on your own planet, with your own species, you own  _actual parents_ ; a lack of basic information can turn your whole world upside-down when your body does something you're not aware it can do, or even  **should**  do. I can't even imagine how it would be to be an alien. Depending on your gender it's especially dangerous, regardless of what genders your actual species has, because of how they might function. Just from a female human perspective; imagine that periods were normal to you, but not your adoptive parents, and they took you to the hospital to do surgery and try to stop it. They're trying to help you, trying to make the bleeding stop because they assume that organ is hemorrhaging, when your body is just doing what it's supposed to do and their well-meant help is just making everything infinitely worse because nothing was wrong in the first place, and trapping the blood will just make it sit there and rot and kill you. And the whole time you're just as panicked as they are because you don't know what's happening either because nobody was able to warn you."

"Or they remove the hemorrhaging organ to save your life and stop the bleeding, only to later discover they've taken your ability to reproduce away," Megamind mused. With new respect he looked up and gave her a relieved smile. "So you tell me humiliating stories about yourself to make me less anxious and remind me that things could be infinitely worse. You, Madam, are a good doctor."

"Thank you, Megamind." Dr. Mardling stood and put her glasses back on and motioned to the door. "I can't deny I'd very much like to continue the exam, but if you aren't comfortable with that you are welcome to leave."

Megamind laughed. "Much as I appreciate the offer, I am curious and I am not a doctor. I told you what was going on because I would like your input."

Dr. Mardling looked somewhat proud, then started toward the door. "Then I'll be right back, I didn't expect I'd need a speculum so I have to go get one."

"What's that?" he asked.

She told him.

He didn't think that embarrassment could get any worse, but was proven wrong not long afterward when he had to change position on the table to help her get a better angle for the examination, because his tunnel pointed toward the back of his body and not the front.

* * *

 

Sometime later, while Dr. Mardling was running the tests on the samples she had gotten thus far and Megamind was still in the exam room by himself, Metro Man strained to stay quiet and still in his chair. He'd stopped watching and listening some time ago, just before he would have been able to see more of Megamind than was strictly decent. He was NOT going to spy on this again. Metro Man had only listened long enough to reassure himself that Megamind was actually going through with his end of the deal this time by telling Dr. Mardling he was staying. Unfortunately, he could not control his sense of smell as well as he could shut off his x-ray and was suffering karmic backlash from his earlier spying in a particularly cruel way.

Metro Man had  _completely_  forgotten about the scent until it started wafting down the hallway. He was stuck here on the promise he'd made not to leave Megamind alone and wouldn't be able to get far enough away to make a difference without leaving the entire block. It might have been a simple matter of their species interacting for so long, as Megamind himself had suggested, that caused them to react to each other this way.

"I'm going to screw this up somehow," he thought aloud while cold creeped up his spine and he resisted the urge to growl. He knew he could hold it back; it just wasn't going to be easy.

"Probably," Bernard agreed flatly, always willing to take the most pessimistic view of every subject even if he had no idea what it was.

Metro Man glared wearily. "I wasn't talking to you."

"Nobody ever does," the man drawled, and just continued typing.


	6. Form and Function

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, the only thing worse than having no idea where to go or what to do in a story is having too many ideas and having to whittle it down. They're all so good that you don't know which ones to go with and which ones to abandon, and you know you can't use all of them but you still really, really want to!  
> Please know that I am VERY aware I am not an expert in genetics, chemistry, evolution, or what-have-you by any standards. Still… I'd like to think I have done enough research to satisfy, at the very least, a fanfiction for a movie that put comic book histories in a blender and made awesome sauce. So for those who have been waiting for me to just spit out the facts already; here ya' go.  
> I hope you like it.

"Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution." ~E. O. Wilson

* * *

 

Bernard was sweet, really, but he needed to stop pestering her.

She'd only been working for two days straight. Considering the hours she regularly pulled on other projects this was barely an annoyance. As if he had any room to be judgmental after he'd spent so long making transcriptions, editing, and cataloging everything they'd learned in the interviews, and subsequently ferreting out how to get permission from Megamind to use most of it.

As it turned out he didn't need to plead very much. The significant part Bernard had played in making Megamind the undisputed main subject of the Villain Wing in the Museum had earned the curator boons - he'd gotten permission to use a far larger portion of the interview than even Dr. Mardling had expected. In fact, Megamind had been extremely helpful to the point of it being downright  _weird_ , but then Dr. Mardling remembered the speech she had given him about feeling alone and lacking information and considered he might have felt the same way, striking up an odd kinship.

Besides, Metro Man could sense lies by paying attention to heartbeat and other factors. He'd have said something if Megamind was being deceptive. At least unreasonably so.

That was what was worrying her, though.

If she hadn't gathered the evidence herself she would have thought Megamind was being intentionally misleading with his physical stats. As it was they were extremely similar to Metro Man's if she accounted for the difference in their body frames. Metro Man had been correct; their internal arrangement was nearly identical aside from the sexual organs. If they hadn't clearly been from different worlds then she would have sworn they were two branches from the same evolutionary tree… then again there were universal traits and parochial traits when things developed. Perhaps this was just the internal arrangement that worked best for each creature as a universal?

Still, it was similar. Eerily similar, in fact. When measuring by human standards they had all too much in common, or more accurately they were off the charts in exactly the same ways.

Megamind weighed too much for his height, because like the other alien in their midst he was just physically denser than the denizens of this world. His blood pressure was too high and his blood sugar too low (surprising considering his sugar-laden dietary survey). There was no vitamin D in him  **whatsoever**  aside from some trace amounts, which was explained by the fact that there were large amounts of it in his urine; some filtering organ that acted like a liver must have been ridding him of any of the native vitamin he got from his food as if it were a contaminant.

The purpose vitamin D usually served in the body was likely fulfilled by the substance they couldn't identify from his blood tests. It seemed to be produced by his body for the same reason as vitamin D, and via roughly the same method – sun exposure. Given that Megamind theorized their worlds had circled a red sun and not a yellow one that would mean he was likely getting way too much sunlight, as well as neatly explaining the chemical difference since the levels of light exposure were so very different.

Vitamins were a good thing unless you got an overdose, and that worried her greatly. She suggested he not ingest too much vitamin D if his body didn't want it there, and avoid too much sunlight if possible and wear any sunscreens that didn't cause him discomfort. Megamind had said she'd have to talk to the warden about recess, he wasn't allowed sunscreen in prison since he'd once made a bomb with it (and various other toiletries), and fuck off away from his coffee; so no dice there.

All of those things, to the letter, were precisely mirrored in Metro Man, now that she had his blood tests to verify those things. Right down to the similar substance she couldn't identify.

There was even the fact that, independent of each other and decades apart, both aliens professed a love of anything very high in sulfur as far as foods were concerned. Durian was listed in both of their favorites lists, while Megamind seemed to favor magnesium as well in the form of very dark chocolate, dried fruit, almonds, pumpkin, and more chocolate. Metro Man liked all that high magnesium fare as well, he simply preferred things high in sulfur by far. Their diets were too similar to ignore the corollaries.

Dr. Mardling sighed and put her glasses down, rubbing her temples. Having finally obtained samples of Metro Man's blood she had instantly begun chemical mapping and further DNA tests, as well as those of Megamind's, and even for computers the likes of which she possessed that took TIME. So few people realized just how HUGE the code to make a living thing was. The samples she had gotten from Metro Man before only really contained what she could get from his semen; blood was far more useful.

The only thing she was positive of was that they were viviparous mammals. Everything from then on was still up for debate.

Genetically speaking there was  _no such thing_  as a group of animals that all behaved exactly the same way; Pandas were classified as carnivores and almost completely herbivorous, Whales were mammals that looked as fishy as could be, Echidnas and Platypus laid eggs despite being mammals, certain fish and one species of bird produced a milk-like substance to feed their young like mammals. The sheer number and variety of mating strategies, sex-determination systems, and gender types were mind-boggling. Hermaphrodites were extremely common in nature; more so than many people were comfortable admitting, and some creatures even changed gender when environmental factors required it like the clownfish. There were infertile drones mass-produced for the sake of manual labor, and extremely fertile queens that mated once and kept popping out eggs forever after. A type of lizard had no males whatsoever and simply cloned themselves, and engaged in sex with other females when they liked. And many, many, many more things that a lot of people got fussy about, prehensile penises included. In the animal kingdom all of those things were perfectly normal.

Megamind said it himself; their planets had a lot longer to evolve than anything on this planet had the chance to thus far. Any effective strategy could have thrived, even if there were no existing examples on this planet to compare them to.

There was one thing she had definitely discovered after examining Metro Man's sperm, though; the ovum decided the gender, not the seed. Metro Man was shooting nothing but boys. Typically, that indicated birds or reptiles here, but mammals had evolved from reptiles and could very likely have held on to that sex determination system even after reaching the warm-blooded stage on either world.

With nothing more to analyze until the DNA mapping came back, she worked on what she DID know, and that was an awful lot of sexual data the two had given her to help her figure out how they really functioned.

Infuriatingly enough that left her with more questions than answers, because despite the drastic and obvious sexual differences… they had nearly identical penises. Both had a baculum of the same basic shape and length. Both of them engorged  _after_  penetration, after which the head expanded. They both pulled UP to stimulate themselves, locking their fingers underneath the head when self-stimulating, indicating that intercourse mainly relied on pulling and not thrusting. From there it thankfully diverged a bit, though, and she had to examine them one-by-one.

When Metro Man, ejaculated it happened in three separate stages.

The first stage leading up to the actual paroxysm contained about 20% of the overall total amount of sperm released in any given session. This initial flow was mostly fluid and only half as dense as human ejaculate, yet contained the same number of actual sperm as a normal human would produce in total. This stage could easily occur before penetration since it preceded orgasm and most often even engorgement. Dr. Mardling theorized that one of the purposes of this first stage might be to provide additional lubrication; useful in a species that evidently got right down to business with little foreplay (if the comments Metro Man had relayed from his previous lovers were accurate).

The second stage occurred at the moment of orgasm and released a much thicker substance containing 70% or so of the total spermatozoa. This 'core' ejaculate was quite dense; the consistency of cake frosting being forced out of a tube. It stuck relentlessly where it was put and remained there until it was washed, scraped, or dissolved in an alkaline solution. In fact for semen it contained nearly no alkaline whatsoever, which probably explained why the sperm cells were inert. Alkalines were  _important_.

The third stage of ejaculate was astoundingly far thicker. It emerged at the consistency of warm marshmallow and hardened very quickly from there to the tacky consistency of warm rubber. This substance contained the straggling, unlucky 10% of sperm that hadn't gotten out in time to avoid becoming part of the last stage. Given the strangeness of the first two stages, this one was blessedly obvious in function.

Dr. Mardling could only assume this last stage was a copulatory plug. Creatures on Earth produced copulatory plugs all the time. Squirrels, Kangaroos, bees, and even some primates produced them. The main benefit was to give the sperm a time advantage over any subsequent mating and keep that specific male's semen right where it needed to be. Competition for mates was often fierce and the longer you could lock your own DNA in place the better. Most species used this as a method of ensuring fertilization as an  **alternative**  to guarding their mates in a territory, not  **in addition**  to it; so Metro Man's species must have been  _competitive as hell_. And like many copulatory plugs, this substance was composed mainly of mild acids.

To illustrate this further came the actual sperm  _count_. By sheer numbers; the man was outstripping every creature she knew of in terms of semen production for body size. By volume he produced about an ounce on the core ejaculate. The top side of average for a human male was 6.5 milliliters… so he was already producing over eight times what humans did just by volume. Compensating for  _density_  was an entirely different matter… if the viscosity of the semen was compensated for until it reached the same consistency as human ejaculate the man comparatively came literal buckets.

There was just one major problem with it; the spermatozoa were, again, inactive. Inert. They didn't move whatsoever, which wasn't all that surprising considering all the missing ingredients normally present in most creatures' ejaculate. Each individual sperm was a little amoeboid thing that was clearly designed to crawl to its destination rather than swim, so a lot less fluid was really needed for that in the first place – 'swimmers' need something to swim  _in_  and 'crawlers' would just need to be in the right place. But a complete absence of  _any_ alkaline substances was impossible unless the female anatomy of Metro Man's species was unlike anything Dr. Mardling had ever seen in nature on earth.

It was  _entirely possible_  that the females of the species possessed the alkalines and remaining substances that Metro Man lacked, but that seemed like it would be detrimental to a vagina considering the acidity of the mucous membranes had a direct function. To a point that just didn't make any SENSE because vaginas tended to be acidic in order to keep themselves clean. The semen usually carried levels of alkaline needed to reduce that acidity… just so that the sperm could survive there long enough to do their job.

Metro Man's 'crawlers' were probably perfectly fine the way they were, and the female's body would provide all the missing ingredients. But then the copulatory plug issue came back, because it could be dissolved by alkaline solutions over time. If the female's body produced the alkalines, wouldn't the plug just dissolve around the edges and fall out before it could harden? Dr. Mardling had experimented with this theory years before (she'd had access to the semen, at least, if not the blood) and found it didn't take much to break down the seal if there was direct contact.

That made the idea that the female filled in those chemical gaps extremely unlikely.

And this was yet another dead-end for now.

Here Dr. Mardling ran out of things to analyze on Metro Man until more information came back, so she moved on to Megamind… who was ostensibly he most interesting alien she had ever examined, despite there only being two in existence on Earth that she knew of.

* * *

 

 _Of course_  Megamind had been doing his own research.

The first thing he did was loosely study everything he could about creatures' mating strategies on Earth, put them on mental file as mere examples, and start all on his own without bothering with direct comparison. His DNA was unlike anything here regardless and nothing was likely to match up anyway; trying would have been counter-productive and a common human failing in logic. The good doctor had been quite helpful, but she was still human and Megamind was very much not. Thus he continued on his own and doubted she would discover anything he couldn't work out for himself.

Aside from the functional direction of his tunnel, that is… he would have taken an embarrassingly long time to figure that one out without a second party available to physically probe him for information and he knew it.

The additional set of samples and all information that Megamind had demanded was blessedly unopposed by any party involved. He'd simply been given them and allowed to leave, as per the agreement he'd made with the brute to begin with… but he was still surprised when it had actually been granted without argument. Dr. Mardling promise Megamind hadn't doubted for a moment after she'd shared her own story, but Metro Man had been oddly accepting of the situation. Then again the man had looked strangely pale after Megamind came out of the back room and had left in rather a hurry. Megamind certainly wouldn't have allowed the hero to run off with samples of  _his_  body… though come to think of it the idiot wouldn't have known what to do with it from a scientific standpoint and the thought of him wanting it for any  _other_  reason was just damned creepy.

Ah well, back to business.

Megamind took five hours to assemble what he needed for the DNA mapping, Blood sample analysis, and general analysis of all other gathered fluids, skin samples, and what-have-you. Of course the skin samples were his own; Dr. Mardling hadn't asked for them, which Megamind thought was out of fairness because she was unlikely to get them from Metro Man. HE preferred to be thorough and would use some of the DNA he had been provided from Metro Man to synthetically grow a skin sample even if he couldn't get it from the man himself. That machine took fifteen minutes to build, since the hero's cells seemed to prefer staying alive and were tenacious enough that he didn't need the constant care and attention to the process that human cells would have required. He would have been surprised if ceasing to refrigerate them would have had any effect whatsoever on the shelf life.

That done Megamind put everything to work and… had some hot cocoa and watched television while the machines worked for him. He generally made nothing that required his intervention outside capers (for dramatic effect, of course) and there was no reason he couldn't theorize and watch something funny at the same time. When the egg timer went off Megamind had enjoyed himself thoroughly for an hour and a half and had several hundred ideas gently bouncing off one another in his head like bubbles. They occasionally linked and formed chains, but mostly he was saving the really solid thinking for when he had all the data back from analysis.

From that point on all he had to do was put whatever he had found up for display so he could stare at it all at once and think. The longest part of this entire process was retrieving the ball of string from the brain-bots, who seemed to be playing catch with it.

The evidence he had gotten from the medical examinations was all rudimentary stuff he had mostly already known aside from what he'd discovered from the blood sample Metro Man had given. The skin samples and analysis of them gave him no new information. Nearly everything he had surmised about his enemy's body and how it worked had been correct to begin with. There were only so many methods a body could use to become that damnably resilient, and theory 4 had been correct (with smatterings of theory 2 thrown in).

The DNA and chemical mapping was the most exciting part, because try as he might Megamind had never been able to get a sample from the brute before. When they were complete Megamind went through his own results first, then looked over Metro Man's and was disturbed by how similar they looked at a glance.

Then he had the computer analyze how close the results were to each other to see how long ago evolution had split their species from the root.

*…..*

*...*

*?!*

*!*

Seven minutes later Minion followed three frantic brain-bots to where Megamind was hyperventilating on the floor in a cold sweat.

* * *

 

Dr. Mardling called Bernard's office the instant she had the results back from the DNA mapping.

"Don't you ever sleep?" he drawled.

"Says the man who's still here too," she snapped. "I know what's going on and you're going to think I'm insane-"

"Too late, woman."

"-but you'd better get over here now."

"Fine," Bernard conceded, and headed over to her office.

Apparently she was so excited she couldn't wait the seven minutes it would take him to navigate his way to the other side of the museum and called his phone while he was midway there. He picked up and didn't even bother with a greeting, or even a 'what?'. He knew she'd start ranting as soon as he answered.

"Do you know how close the DNA is between Humans and Chimpanzees or Bonobos?" she demanded.

"No, I just heard it's close," he sighed. "Can this wait?"

"The difference between them is roughly 1.2%. That's not a lot really. But it's enough for us to be different species. See that 1.2% isn't just instructions on 'how to make an ape', it's like a program and that little bit of difference is composed of a lot of things that tell the rest of the code how to organize itself," she continued doggedly. "How far are you?"

"Halfway up Metro Man's nose," the man answered, clutching his coat around himself on the bridge between the towers. "Whoever decided to keep these bridges open-air should be flogged."

"I believe that was you," she laughed.

"Go on then."

Bernard heard frantic typing in the background as she spoke. "On that same percentage scale the average difference between individual humans is about 0.1%. If the codes are that close, then it's pretty much a given that the subjects are the same species."

"And this is important for me to know on the way there,  **why**?" he asked as he entered the Hero Wing.

"Because Metro Man and Megamind are only divergent from each other by 0.0963%!"

Bernard snorted. "Then run your number again because they can't be the same species."

"Oh, no – this isn't just about the numbers anymore. I'll show you the proof when you get here. They are definitely the same species!"

"If you must," he said, then flipped his phone shut. Before he went to her office he went by the bathrooms and snack machines first, only daring to head into one of her lectures with and empty bladder and something sugary to put in his stomach to make the experience more bearable.

"How the hell did you manage  ** _that_** , Vanessa?" the curator demanded when he walked in and saw something that should have been impossible on her screen.

He knew very well that Merto Man's ameaboid sperm were and had always been dormant. But now he saw them – they couldn't have been anything else – displayed on her screen and squirming around like disturbing little balloon animals.

She turned and gave him a bag-eyed, tired grin and snatched the second hot chocolate he had brought up with him. "After I got the results back from the DNA mapping I mixed the fluid samples I got from Megamind into some of Metro Man's-"

"EW," Bernard complained.

"Don't you know what this means!?" she demanded hotly. "It's a spermatheca!"

"A what? What is?" he drawled.

"The organ I couldn't identify in Megamind!"

"Alright, but what's a spermatheca?" he sighed.

She whipped around and pulled up a few new windows. "You know how queen bees can mate only once and keep making eggs pretty much forever? It's because they have a spermatheca; an organ specifically meant to store, preserve, and sometimes selectively release sperm when needed. I've only ever encountered this type of organ in females or hermaphrodites, never in a male! But it looks like there are two distinct types of males in this species and each one only produces  **half** of the ingredients to make effective sperm! The enzymes I got from Megamind are almost entirely alkalines and other chemicals that trigger capacitation and hyperactivation, which Metro Man's body  _can't do_  because his glands don't produce all of the needed ingredients!"

"Keep in mind I'm not an Exobiologist," he snapped.

"Okay," she conceded, taking a few breaths to calm down and taking a few sips of the hot chocolate to help with thought and energy levels. "Think of it like a mixing pot. You know how the human body produces sperm, right?"

Bernard made a disgusted face. "As long as it works I don't need to know  _how_."

"It takes a lot more than one organ to make sperm, Bern," she said. "It's a succession of things – vesicles, ducts, glands, enzymes… lots of stuff goes into making sperm work. They're not just little soldiers that pop out ready to march without training and supplies, is what I'm saying. If you took an individual sperm cell out of the seminal vesicle without letting it mix with all the glandular fluids and things that it would normally be mixed with on the way out of the body then you'd wind up with the same problem Metro Man has now; it'd only be half complete."

"The stuff Megamind makes in the spermatheca thing wakes up the dormant crawlers," he repeated flatly. "So Megamind is what? If their chromosomes indicate a diploid system and there are clearly females in Megamind's memories, then how the hell can you have three genders?"

"Megamind is a male! They're  ** _both_** male! The trigger for this dual male system is in an autosome, not an allosome; basically there's a separate set of instructions that takes the complete 'male' code and says 'use these bits but not those bits' and controls how they grow and develop into adults. The opening leading to Megamind's spermatheca probably wasn't capable of being broken into until recently, after puberty had begun. Otherwise it would have been closed up."

"I guess that makes sense," Bernard mused. "The same thing triggers the way their brains work, right? Same processing power, different 'on' switches."

"Right! That even reinforces the female mimic theory because the females Megamind told us about look and act exactly like the blue males he saw. They work the same way right down to the mental switches. Still – no matter how much they resemble the females in look and mental function, the Blue Males are still very much male. But neither male can produce fully viable semen unless the two of them work together. This species doesn't just have a single male, it has…  _cooperative males_. Neither one of which is capable of breeding independently. Each type of male has only half of what's needed to make a fully-fertile sperm cell."

"So what does that mean exactly?" he asked.

"It MEANS that it takes three people to make a baby," she explained patiently. "At least. I don't have a female here so I can't compare beyond the two males we have access to. The Territorial Males mate with the Blue Males, then the Blue Males inseminate the Female with the now active spermatozoa."

Bernard took off his glasses, rubbed his temples, put them back on. It was a weird mental image and now he couldn't get rid of it. In order for breeding to work for this species you had males having sex with each other before impregnating a female was even possible, and that was normal. Alien indeed. He snapped, " **How**  did  **that** evolve!?"

"I have a theory!"

"Of course you do."

"What's the one thing that's rampant in Territorial creatures?"

"Fighting," he said automatically.

"No!" She paused and considered the sense of that answer. "Well, yes… but I meant something else," Dr. Mardling said. " _Cheating._  Lots of Territorial animals have developed ways to cheat to maintain genetic diversity, and one of those things is  _different types of males._  There could be two or three types even when you look at animals we have here; birds, fish, lizards, snakes… One of those types is usually a  _female mimic_  that looks the way he does in order to sneak past the bigger, stronger males and spread his genes around without getting thrown out of the territory."

"So the first step in your theory is that the territorial thing started first in a simple male/female species with that mimic, with both types of males fully fertile on their own, and somehow led to a dual male situation?" Bernard asked.

Dr. Mardling took more of the sugary drink and let it heat the inside of her mouth before swallowing. She nodded. "Yeah. It might have started with developmental mimicry, sort of like how cheetah cubs have black and white striped fur on their backs that mimic the pattern of the honey badger, because resembling something that vicious helped them escape from predators via mistaken identity. Lions are terrified of honey badgers if they've ever met one, and they'd be leery about facing anything black and white striped again, in addition to the already existing fear of skunks. So that pattern helps keep the cheetah cubs safe and they live long enough to shed that patterned baby-fur and survive to adulthood."

Bernard yawned and sat in the nearest chair. "And with offspring that looked entirely female – cute blue things with big heads – the territorial male would have had trouble telling which were the males he needed to either get rid of or kick out of his territory until they were old enough to survive on their own."

"Yes! If all the males are Territorial, then inevitably the young males will eventually have to leave and establish their own areas. So as a fail-safe to ensure they're old enough to make it they could have been born blue and only developed the obviously male coloring and shape later on." Dr. Mardling opened up another window and started typing out everything they were discussing so she could present it to her patients when she called them later to let them know of their findings. "Then Evolution figured out pretty quickly that looking like a female made it easier for some of those young males to sneak in under the bigger males' radar and spread their genes. That must have proven such an effective strategy that the young males that stayed blue longer passed on their genes further until certain blue males  _stopped growing up to be Territorial_  and became either live-in female mimics or nomads going from place to place spreading their DNA where the females weren't being watched too closely."

"Females are usually the driving force for this sort of strategic breeding, aren't they?" Bernard asked. "Everyone is mainly concerned with spreading their own DNA; males and females alike. So with a variety of male types to choose from she can have both strong males to look after her and her daughters and nomadic, intelligent males to spread her DNA far and wide."

"Right!" Dr. Mardling sighed and turned around. "Here's where it gets depressing though. Most species would have just stopped there. But with the amount of time a red sun would have given them to develop into more advanced strategies… can you guess the next step?"

"They got intelligent enough to figure out what genes were, and how DNA crossed over, and the blue males were suddenly in trouble. Sentience combined with intelligence and the big guys figured it out." Bernard made a face and sat back in his chair. "Ick, that sounds like the war of the sexes on a Holocaust level of stupid. But what remotely intelligent female is going to stick around with a male that threatens her babies, mimics or not?"

"Ah, but that's the point. They won't," Dr. Mardling stated flatly. "That drove  _stronger_ Territorial males to keep the females in line, and  _more intelligent_  females to compensate, and  _more intelligent_ and  _efficient_  female mimics to get past them both and survive."

"As strong as Metro Man, even his ancestors, must be; how did the blue guys stand a chance?" Bernard asked.

The woman swished her cup around morosely. "I suppose eventually the blue males managed to survive by becoming distributors of the Territorial males DNA and not their own. I'm not sure if that evolved or if it was genetic engineering to both placate the females rather than killing off the mimics and keep the mimics from out-breeding their patriarchs – both are possible with intelligent creatures. But we both know that the territorial males were going to come out on top somehow, and the blue males were doomed unless they stopped being competition."

"So if both types of males eventually wound up needing each other, who won?" Bernard asked.

She shook her head at him. "You're thinking of this as a competition between the males. It's not. The  **females**  won. This sort of thing is always significantly influenced by the females because they have the most control over the offspring. Think: who would make a better father? The guy always off fighting or the smart blue males that can stay with them at all times and help with the children? The first type is necessary, but the second type is just wanted. If this was just a competition between the males then the territorial ones would have eradicated the blue males LONG before this weird genetic rock-paper-scissors thing happened."

"Oh, I see now." Bernard snorted. "The females had the option of having the best of both types of males and grasped at it until they got their way."

Dr. Mardling agreed. "If only in some areas in the beginning; the two types of males would have thrived together. Having the blue males in the territory started attracting more females because a) they knew they'd have help raising the offspring if the mimics decided to stay and not wander b) the offspring would thrive for the extra help, and c) it indicated that Territorial Male wouldn't make them get rid of a third of their babies! The territoriality would eventually have to expand to include the blue males as useful things to keep on an instinctive level; more mates for the territorial males and a higher survival rate for his offspring. The big males would have no choice but to adapt or the females would have left."

"No female will stay if you menace her baby, and as smart as they were the females would have left the territories that didn't allow them to keep their blue sons and stay with more accepting territorial males. Those accepting males that needed the blue males help just to reproduce  _bred better_ through female selection and preference, and over a very long time they actually  _bred out_  the fully fertile and more violent males over time. For a territorial creature, Metro Man is astoundingly nice about it, isn't he? He's the results of thousands – possibly millions - of years of it being  _necessary_  that the blue things in his area wanted to stay there. He's-"

"-an overprotective babysitter rather than a tyrant that guards you like a treasure hoard," Bernard finished for her. "Because he evolved to behave that way. Because you get more babies that way. You have to be strong  _and_  nice." The man looked down out the doorway toward the villain wing, did a few quick summations, and snorted with one short laugh. "Lucky for us. I can't imagine what would have happened if the territorial males were still aggressive when they got here. It would be rude to say genocide, but…" He sighed. "No wonder the big guy does whatever he can not to hurt the criminals and villains he captures. They're not other territorial males, and they're not food. So his default action is 'capture gently' because that's what his instincts are telling him to do."

Dr. Mardling smiled. "And then population control sets in."

Bernard looked back to her. "What?"

"This three gender system is an  _extremely_  effective, safe, nonviolent, and natural form of birth control; no chemicals or surgeries needed. Population always rises faster than resources can compensate for. The number of mouths to feed will rapidly approach the point where birth control will become essential inside marked territories, lest they overtax the land and starve to death. Just abstaining from sex entirely  **won't work**. Just like every other animal these people are made to crave sex; it's part of being a sexually reproductive species. Sex will happen, bar none, and sticking with only male + female pairs there will inevitably be babies galore, less resources, and with no birth control the problem spirals out of control. Extinction is pretty much a certainty, if only in certain areas."

"BUT if you add a little foresight and creativity, another option becomes available, even leaving out same-sex pairs. Just avoid fertile combinations! Have as much sex as you want – territorial male and female, territorial male and blue male, female and unfertilized blue male – as long as you pass by that ONE fertile combination of a fertilized blue male and female there's no risk of pregnancy whatsoever! That option must have been devastatingly attractive to the females… or really anyone intelligent enough to see the benefits of it. Even the bigger males."

"The simple ability to have sex freely without taxing the limited resources inside marked boundaries would have helped weed out the genes of those territorial males that could still breed independently of the blue males. So the intelligence factor became a HUGE deciding element in the process. Suddenly the territorial males that could NOT fertilize a female on his own  _won_  a competition with the ones that could because the females – and blue males – preferred his company!"

Bernard nearly choked on his drink when the idea struck. "Heh. Doesn't that also mean that the blue males can mate with each other without the risk of pregnancy, and if they inhabit the same territory it won't matter because they're carrying the same male's sperm anyway?"

Dr. Mardling froze. "...or the blue males could sneak their own territorial males' DNA into other territories by secondarily inseminating blue males there and contaminating a rival's gene pool."

"These blue guys have the potential to be some shady, territory hopping, gene smuggling, cheating motherfuckers, don't they?" Bernard asked.

"As a method of promoting genetic diversity of course…"

"That's a  _polite_  way to put it."

There was a pause while they both processed the implications of this sort of behavior in sentient beings. It wasn't difficult because they were human, and even among the most reserved of human societies – for example, the Amish – about 20% of the offspring regularly didn't belong to the father. Greek Legends didn't even  **begin**  to match the senselessly drama intense family dynamics even a normal, well-adjusted territory could produce if these theories were true… and they didn't even know how big those territories could conceivably be.

Suddenly the sexually trimorphic, blue skinned and hyper intelligent or huge and super powered aliens seemed very relatable to humanity in a hilariously depressing way.

"I wanna see a show written from the perspective of a family like this." Dr. Mardling admitted.

"I'd watch that." Bernard, for whom 'misery loves company' was practically a sanity mantra, could barely maintain his cool. There was a tiny bit of glee in his normally deadpan voice. "I'd watch the  _hell_  out of that. There's also something pretty important that you're missing here."

"What's that?" she asked, as she finished up the notes of their conversation.

"Why didn't Megamind figure it out for himself?" Bernard asked.

Dr. Mardling shrugged as she kept typing. "He just recently started going through puberty."

"Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on that. The urge to actually have sex doesn't negate the fact that the flirty thing starts up long before then. Little boys pull little girls' hair when they're too young to get to the bus stop by themselves. Clearly, I think at least, Metro Man noticed a long time ago that Megamind was attractive. He's always, ALWAYS suspiciously unhurt upon capture even compared to other villains, Metro Man goes out of his way to obey Megamind's unwritten 'rules' unless he has no choice, and he even trusts Megamind to avoid hurting civilians if it can at all be avoided. I think Metro Man's been sweet on the guy for a couple of decades, if not longer."

As she finished the notes, Dr. Mardling turned to face Bernard. "So what's the problem?"

Bernard grimaced at her. "You should remember High School. Think about it; some spoiled psycho you don't like at all starts being nice to you for absolutely any reason. How do you feel if they're at all physically interesting?"

"Oh, SHIT," the greying woman deadpanned. "Megamind doesn't find Metro Man attractive!"

"Not in the least," Bernard let out an entirely unamused huff of breath. "Whether he knows it or not, Megamind has taken 'Not if you were The Last Man Alive' to its literal extreme. From a sexual standpoint he's so uninterested in Metro Man he never even wondered if they might be compatible, let alone the same thing."

"Is that a problem?" she asked.

"Considering we've got the last of the species here, female or not?" the curator snorted. "I'd think so."

"I really hope it's just because they're too young," she muttered. "They're both still maturing, though I think Megamind is doing so faster, since he probably matches pace with the females."

"If that's not the reason?" Bernard asked.

Dr. Mardling groaned and palmed her face. "That could be an issue when they do get there and Metro Man starts wanting to keep Megamind in his boundaries. What'll happen if he tries to leave?"

Bernard hummed in thought. "I guess we'll find out."

* * *

 

Once Megamind's panic attack had subsided and Minion had stopped freaking out and trying to call the prison physician while the Brain-Bots restrained him things devolved into a somber sort of mood. Megamind had given up on getting anything at all productive done and put on his robe and slippers, brooding in his chair near a television he wasn't watching with a mug of tea that he was really only using as a prop to warm his hands with.

"There's a gap where we meet," he sang dourly. "Where I end and you begin… and I'm sorry for us."

Minion sighed. "Is this really the time for Radiohead, Sir?"

"Bite your tongue, Minion," Megamind uttered blankly, then fell into a severe villainous growl.  _"It's **always**  time for Radiohead."_

"I won't argue that," the fish conceded, mostly because he knew he would lose. "Will you at least tell me what happened? Are you sure you don't need to see someone? I could call your new doctor if you'd rather see her," he offered.

Megamind smiled a little; that was a big offer considering how suspicious Minion was of her. "I'm sure, thank you. It was just an event. I'm alright now."

"Sir," Minion started as he sat down in the adjacent chair. "You are not alright. It looked like you were having a heart attack."

The villain chuckled humorlessly, a bit insanely. "It sort of felt like it, too."

Minion grimaced. "What's going on?"

Megamind blew on the tea and decided he didn't want it after all and set it on the side table. "What do you remember about our home world, Minion?"

Blindsided, Minion stammered for a few seconds before taking a moment to actually consider that. "Not much, I'm afraid. I was a baby too, really. I remember your mother. I know you have her eyes. Everything else is sort of blank until she handed me to you and I really started remembering more."

"She made you for me," Megamind said slowly. "I'm sorry, Minion. I never really considered it before, but when I was going through my own memories of my parents I know now that she did. She was a geneticist or some similar profession or it was a skill she had regardless of her actual work. There were creatures that resembled you in tanks and things in the place where they were building my – our – escape pod. I think that my people had identified this planet, perhaps visited before at one time as Dr. Mardling has surmised in her brilliant way. They knew where Earth was, but by the time our sun devolved it happened so fast and there wasn't TIME." Here he shivered and pulled the robe tighter around himself. "I think mother was taking bit of genes from creatures from our own world and trying to create a companion for me that resembled a creature this world already had. Perhaps that way I might be allowed to keep you and I'd have a constant companion, even if there wasn't enough time or material for one of them to come here with me." He picked up the mug again, frowned at it, realized his hands were just bored and threw it.

"Sir!" Minion admonished, but just sighed and let it go with the subject hovering in the air. "I had wondered, but I didn't want to ask you because I thought remembering something we couldn't do anything about would just make you upset."

"You should be able to ask me these things," Megamind argued. "And I am sorry I never thought to bring it up."

"What is this all about?" the fish demanded. "Sir, please tell me. Is it something you found out about Metro Man from all this stuff?" he asked, gesturing to the papers hanging all around the workstation, rife with both aliens' medical analyses.

"Yes, it is, Minion," Megamind admitted. "It's not his fault, or mine, or anyone's. I just hadn't realized until today how much that idiot scares me."

Minion frowned and thought back to all the battles, capers, schemes, kidnappings and everything else the two rivals had been through over the years. "Sir, do you really think he's dangerous?"

Megamind shuddered and folded in on himself in the chair. "Yes. I really think he might be."


	7. Adequately Explained by Stupidity

_"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." ~ Hanlon's Razor_

* * *

 

The tinny, musical ringing made Megamind groan. He lifted his head from the nest of pillows and glared at the device next to him on the nightstand, recognizing it as one of Minion's pilfered common conveniences. The fish must have put it there after Megamind had fallen asleep. The phone vibrated on the surface and only made his lingering headache worse. He considered pitching it out the window, but then considered it might be Minion and answered it with dramatic reluctance.

"Ollo."

Dr. Mardling's voice was brighter than the sunlight peeking in through the windowpanes and just as annoying. "Megamind! Good morning."

"How did you get this number?" he demanded, half asleep.

"Minion called me to make sure I didn't think another visit was needed after your panic attack. I got him to calm down before he called an ambulance or something. Seems like the location of your lair is less important than you are," she said.

"How did he get YOUR number?" he asked, mildly more cognizant now and making a mental note that he owed her one for preventing a media catastrophe.

"I'm listed," she sighed.

"Ugh," he complained vaguely, letting his head thump back down on the pillows.

"Are you alright?" Dr. Mardling asked with concern. "When Minion said you were hyperventilating I figured you were just in shock over the DNA mapping results. It sure as hell shocked  _me_ , and it isn't even my DNA."

"If you've called to offer me an  _explanation_ -" he started irately.

"Oh, no. I trust that you've figured out everything I did and more," she said.

So she knows, wonderful. Megamind rubbed his forehead with his free hand to relieve the tension. If he mulled over something for too long he tended to get cramps and soreness there, just from the sour expression it caused overtaxing the muscles. He was still reeling over it.

The same species. He and his archenemy were the  ** _same species_**! They  _couldn't_  have known; they'd been infants for pity's sake! The fact that it had never occurred to Megamind they might have a closer connection considering they landed on the same planet on the same day from the same general origin and in pods using similar technology heaped so much of the responsibility for it all on Megamind that he'd spent a good portion of last night continuing to piece it all together as best he could. Damn it, he  _should_  have figured it out! Or at least  _questioned it!_  Metro Man was a thick as a glacier - Megamind had no choice but to accept it as at least 60% his fault that they hadn't known. The remaining 40%, Megamind had decided, was due to Metro Man's superior senses and the fact that  _he_  didn't make the connection on their similar interior structures up until recently. The brute had to have  _some_  responsibility, after all, especially after essentially stating that Megamind felt… normal to him. Metro Man had never questioned why Megamind was around because the blue man felt like one of the only normal things in a strange alien world.

The growling, too. WHY hadn't it occurred to him to investigate the growling!?

Oddly enough Megamind trusted that the good doctor hadn't told anyone yet so he refrained from making any comments on the matter.

"I'm calling because I have a question," she added, when he didn't answer her.

Megamind sat up and continued rubbing the ache out of his face. While the call was undoubtedly frustrating at this hour he did appreciate that she was calling him for more information and not assuming he needed any more from her. That would have been outright insulting.

"Which is?" he prompted.

"Can you see in infrared?"

He blinked, surprised. "How did you know that?" Then he mentally swore at himself for giving it away.

"I've been researching what effects a red sun would have on an Earth-like planet. The ability to see in infrared seems like something that most creatures would definitely have developed due to the difference in available wavelengths. With less visible light available it would only make sense for-"

"Be careful with that phrase, 'Earth-like'," he warned again. "But to answer your question; yes."

"What does that do to the way you see? Can you see white light too? I KNOW you can see in color."

He sighed and stretched, resigning himself to an annoying morning. "Most often it's a blend. I can see that the notebook on my side table is green, but I can also tell that it's the same temperature as the room. If someone had touched it recently, long enough to warm it at least, I would see a glow at the points of contact. During the night or just in the dark my eyes seem to shift emphasis by themselves to focus more on sensing temperature than light, and visa-versa in bright light. Most often it all blends."

"What color would your skin appear in the light of a red sun? Blue, or-"

"You're thinking of it wrong," he chided irritably. "A red dwarf would still emit white light, merely far less than a brighter star like Sol would. It wouldn't be like those silly science classes where they shine a completely red light on a blue ball to prove it would turn black. Stars don't work the same way flashlights do."

"Right, sorry," Dr. Mardling said sheepishly.

"Think of it this way," Megamind continued. "If Earth itself were orbiting my parent star then the atmosphere would still be blue due to the similar scattering of white light. However, the color would be darker and muted because there will be  _less_  of the white light to scatter, and thus the atmosphere far less opaque. Brighter nearby stars would be visible during the day with a more transparent atmosphere. Shadows would have been far darker and sharper, the light reaching the ground would have a red tint, and night would be far darker in comparison due to the lack of ambient light carried throughout the system."

He took a slow, deep breath in lieu of yawning. "However with less white light to scatter, and more red in the mix, the sky would not be  _entirely_  blue. The scattering would produce different effects depending on where the sun was positioned in the sky. Think of the sun in the sky right after dawn when the red tint has gone and the sun is just high enough to be in a completely blue sky. On my world the areas immediately around the sun would appear yellow and orange no matter where it was in the sky, then phase to a darker blue outside that, then in the far distance away from the sun one would be able to see hints of green; but for the most part the sky would still be blue."

"That sounds gorgeous," she said sadly. "And how would you look?"

"The light reaching the surface would have a reddish tint, so I would just be a slightly darker blue. Only a few shades, you understand; not truly significant." Here he paused and sighed. "These effects would have been a bit less drastic if the star was a reddish orange rather than red."

"It almost sounds like you're guessing," she ventured carefully.

"Cheating, really. There was a mural I saw of a sunrise or sunset, but my young eyes were still a bit blurred so I'm not certain on the exact color. It didn't occur to bring it up in the interview. I suppose a dark orange star would be more likely since tidal locking would be far too likely with a red dwarf, and that can wreak havoc on a planet's atmosphere and weather," he said.

"That's when the planet stops spinning and the same side of the planet always faces the star? Like the moon does to Earth?" she asked.

"Correct. And I was born after the sun was no longer glowing," he stated simply. "I never saw my world's sky in its normal state – only that mural." His tone went faintly jealous and pitying at once. "Metro Man would have seen the darkening sun, though, from his own world if they lived close enough to the surface of the atmosphere. He was quite a bit older than I was. But, sadly, he isn't able to remember it, so I can't be certain."

Both of them were sullenly quiet. Then; "I'd be tempted to put you on antidepressants, but I don't know what they'd do," Dr. Mardling mused.

"I do! I wouldn't be depressed anymore after a couple of weeks," Megamind said cheerfully.

"Really? "she asked suspiciously.

"Because I'd be dead."

She laughed. "Okay, you're fine; you're just a jerk. I have been wondering, though. How did a red dwarf or even an orange star turn into a black hole? They don't do that, do they? Only really big stars have enough mass to collapse that far. Red or orange doesn't matter here; your star would still have been far too small."

"I can answer that question easily," Megamind droned. "Either it was a sophisticated weapon, a Doomsday Device of some kind, or one of the planets' populations decided to try and 'fix' the fading light of an old star rather than simply relocating to another solar system.. and failed miserably. In other words; our doom was artificial. Sadly, I think I'd prefer to think of it as an attack rather than some clumsy scientist's biggest possible 'oops'," he grumbled. "At least then there would be someone to blame. It isn't as if the larger males of our species weren't intimidating enough to warrant a preemptive strike."

"I'm so sorry, Megamind. I didn't mean to make you dwell on a painful subject this morning. You've got enough to worry about already," she said.

"Don't trouble yourself, Ma'am. The subject itself is at fault, not you," he said plainly.

For a few moments there was another long silence. Tension rose until Dr. Mardling faced the lingering problem head-on.

"We  **are** going to have to tell Metro Man."

"Do you have the slightest inkling," Megamind began acidly, "-how tempted I am to shout 'not it' and hang up on you?"

She laughed. "So why haven't you?"

Because you're correct, he thought. Because I should have figured it out on my own and wouldn't have succeeded without your help, if even just for a different perspective. Because he isn't capable of figuring it out and for once needs MY help with something and he's so dense he didn't even understand how his own super-speed actually works.

"Because I want you to tell me what you know so I can compare it to what I know," he lied. "There's no sense in telling him anything if we're still forming the most likely theories. Knowing that brute it would only confuse him."

She told him. While they talked Megamind was given his coffee and breakfast by Minion, who seemed pleased that he was talking to his doctor, if only on theories and such. Minion started to interrupt the conversation to ask what they were talking about, but Megamind mouthed 'AMBULANCE?' and the fish wisely escaped while he still had the chance.

Dr. Mardling 's typing could clearly be heard in the background while she took notes. "What I don't understand is; why did they live on two different planets?"

Megamind hesitated. This was foggy at best, but it was the only explanation that made sense to him and unfortunately there was no way to gather more evidence. "Not all of them did. I would think it very likely they were using the neighboring planet as a training ground. What other environment would be able to test them? I saw that world only a few times – once as my pod sped away from it and once through transmissions, but the transmissions seemed to be taking place in offices and had no windows. I believe the territories on my planet may have been shared by groups of related males, perhaps in smaller individual family plots in a larger related group."

"Training would clearly be needed to strengthen the next generation of guardians before any real battle occurred or the loss of young males would have been unacceptably high. With higher levels of intelligence involved the older males would have begun teaching the younger, and that would require swathes of the territory which would then be unavailable for the majority of the inhabitants to actually live in purely because of the amount of destruction that would cause. The best way to solve this problem would be to have the training outside of the territory; in great gaps between them or, preferably, not even on the home planet."

Dr. Mardling stopped typing. "You're saying that the planet Metro Man was actually launched from was just the neighboring world that the territorial males used for combat training. And the planet you were launched from was the actual home world where everyone evolved and most of the species lived."

"Well,  ** _I_**  certainly couldn't have survived on the other planet," Megamind drawled. "No more than you could survive on Venus. The offices I saw those transmissions taking place in were obviously simple buildings that couldn't have existed on the planet's surface – it would have melted. Think, though, that there are currently terraforming theories on floating colonies that could exist on Venus; simply place them at points in the atmosphere far above ground where the temperatures are similar to those on Earth."

"That IS a good theory," she said, typing again. "But why was he there as a baby instead of-"

"I haven't the slightest clue," Megamind said flatly.

He did though. It could have been one of hundreds of reasons! Megamind found it hard to even list them all. One thing was for certain, though; Metro Man had been  _chosen_  to be sent in that pod. For whatever reason it had been, there was no mistaking THAT. The pod had been perfectly designed. Someone funded it,  _planned_  it,  ** _intended_**  it. That thing wasn't the work of last-minute panic. It made sense even with the limited time frame of days of preparation. The territorial males had more time to build it in due to the speed factor, but it would have been  _designed_  by one of the blue people in mere hours. With the right instructions and tools even common electricians, welders, and metalsmiths could build a functional spacecraft given enough time… and super-speed would have given them  _ample_  time.

And if Metro Man had been chosen to be sent in that way, it was almost impossible he had been alone. There wouldn't have been just one. No species was that stupid. The chances of repopulation were ridiculously low given the genetic makeup he had seen in the DNA profile without at least four thousand people from diverse gene pools providing genes; not as many as humans would need for a stable gene pool, but easily enough to be challenging. To avoid the popular sire effect that meant a roughly equal number of territorial males and females, as well as enough blue males to activate and distribute the males' genes which added another five hundred at the very least; for comfort's sake it was likely closer to an equal number of blue males as well. Divide into breeding triples, perhaps several families sharing a blue male if resources were taxed too far to send many. Everyone has a territory big enough for their own offspring, everyone plays nice.

Somewhere out there were likely some colonies. More than likely. Almost definite.

Megamind's pod on the other hand had been thrown together by desperate parents who had limited time and resources and only what little materials the territorial male had been able to scrounge together between battles. It was a miracle the thing had worked at all.

If there was a plan, then Megamind had  **not**  been a part of it. He may have been considered, which would explain how his parents knew other babies were being sent, but Megamind hadn't made the cut. So they had made their own pod. Even Megamind's gender made sense in that regard; he would have been readily accepted into whatever colony he landed on. He couldn't possibly have interfered with the genetic plan that was already set up, he would have only assisted it.

It was the revelation that had caused the headache and most of the worrying. MORE of their species were out there. They had to be; nothing else made sense. Megamind hadn't a clue where they had been sent, or how many there might actually be beyond his estimates, or why there weren't more of them on Earth. The very inkling that Metro Man had been sent on purpose to Earth and nobody else had made it there was stupid.

He voiced these thoughts aloud and listened to silence while Dr. Mardling thought it over.

She sighed and said, "So either you two are the only ones that made it or the others landed in areas on the planet that are so remote we don't know they're there… or your pods colliding in the asteroid field knocked Metro Man off course and you two were just lucky enough to land on a habitable planet."

"I was hoping you'd come up with something other than exactly what I was thinking," Megamind complained.

"Sorry. I'm only human," she said.

That brought Megamind back to the most upsetting possibility of them all, the one that'd helped in triggering his little panic attack.

What  ** _now_**? Was this the end of The Game?

That was a horrifically depressing thought.

Megamind had been raised in a prison, he had never left the city limits, and the thought of being stuck where he was didn't distress him nearly as much as he thought it probably should. The potential loss of his freedom as it pertained to the whole of Metrocity was basically, par for the course. That was likely, frighteningly, normal. It was just something that his species  _did_. Megamind had to accept the fact that he lived in Metro Man's territory and had never felt any inclination to leave it. Fine, alright, that was probably normal. Unless he was being badly mistreated Megamind was likely to remain content within the territory and have no urge to relocate, and if he did… perhaps Metro Man would feel the need to do something about that. It would have to be tested of course, but he could figure it out.

The possibility that, inevitably, one or both of them would become interested in how this pertained to their future love lives was yet another issue that he would deal with when it came up. Did Megamind think that Metro Man would be in any way cruel to him if instinct drew them together? No. Metro Man may be a selfish jackass unintentionally but he wouldn't do so on purpose; that was rather part of his reliability in The Game. Would it be so terrible? Megamind had to admit that his body had decided to react favorably to the scent Metro Man had left behind in the office, which only made him nervous and uncomfortable until he figured out why. It was an odd, disconcerting thought but to be honest  _what about this entire situation **wasn't**_?

It was the potential loss of FUN that disturbed him the most. When all this came to fore and they started to work it all out, would he have to stop playing? That would be terrible; Megamind knew his place in the world and he didn't fit anywhere else. It hurt just to think about it. No more grand schemes, no more playful banter, no more kidnapping Roxanne… it was gut-wrenching. Oh, the  _boredom_! The nights spent with naught to do but flip through channel after channel of endless mind-numbing drivel! That sounded almost as boring as actually being stuck in prison!

If Megamind couldn't play the Game anymore, then what would he  _DO_?  _There had never been anything else!_

Everything else could wait for the moment. This needed to be tested with the information he currently had available, and while Metro Man was likely still reeling from the brief camaraderie Megamind had allowed during the truce.

"When are we going to tell Metro Man?" Dr. Mardling pressed.

"As a matter of fact, I have an appointment to meet with him today," Megamind declared in a frighteningly chipper manner.

Dr. Mardling was well aware that Suddenly Cheerful Villain was  _not_  a good thing. "Wait, what are you talking about?"

"It's Thursday. Miss Ritchi is expecting me. I will let you know if there's time to have a discussion with Metro Man, but in the meantime-"

The woman stood up at her desk and shook her finger at the phone as if she were chiding her son. "Megamind, you are  _not_  to hurt that poor girl-"

"Perish the thought," he said.

"-and that is not the only way to get Metro Man's attention!"

"I am aware," Megamind preened. "This is a pre-existing appointment. Not to worry, I have nothing extraordinarily evil planned, just the usual."

"Megamind!"

"Good day, doctor," Megamind said politely and hung up. Then he spent an hour locating where Minion had escaped to so that they could start getting things ready. Megamind certainly wasn't going to glue all that fluff on by himself, and the Brain-bots kept trying to eat it.

* * *

 

Metro Man knew something was amiss.

Dr. Mardling hadn't called him to talk about what she had discovered, other than to say that Megamind was perfectly healthy and he had nothing to worry about on that front as far as she knew. While that was comforting it did not actually explain  _anything else_. And Metro Man had to know. The brief conversation he'd overheard while Megamind was in the examination room with his doctor had been unsettling at best.

Regardless of why the whole thing had started there was now a whole new problem to deal with. WHY had it never occurred to Metro Man that Megamind may face precisely the same problem of feeling perpetually out-of-place? It was so blatantly obvious. They were both aliens, just different kinds. Now that the idea was in his head he couldn't get rid of it. He'd had someone easily available to talk to that might have helped him with it; someone who knew how he felt. Could their entire Hero/Villain game have been avoided if Wayne had just talked to the little guy about it when they were kids? The blue man seemed like he belonged here whenever Wayne had interacted with him. True, he didn't get along with the rest of the people here much, even before he had started strategically holding the most popular girl in school hostage… but Megamind seemed to be so cheerful all the time; he was the perkiest villain Metro Man had ever faced that wasn't legitimately insane about it.

Then again, as far as everyone knew, Metro Man was perfectly content too. Not even Lord and Lady Scott knew that their son was on the verge of a… well, Wayne wasn't sure what it was but it felt like this city might not be worth his effort anymore. Something vital was missing.

And what about Megamind? Was he scared? Angry? Did HE feel out of place too despite Metro Man's perceptions? Megamind probably felt, with good reason, that Metro Man belonged here perfectly well. It had been pointed out to him many times by the villain that he had it easy; at least he resembled a portion of this planet's population on the outside, and how lucky for him that his pod had landed in one of the places where they resided. Given that very valid point, and how acidly Megamind had said it, it was likely.

It was a common ground Metro Man hadn't expected, and he'd never expected it because he was clearly an IDIOT. Another alien from the same quadrant! He was being raised on the same alien world – that should have been obvious, but it had never occurred to Metro Man to mention it. Even after, as Megamind had so accurately stated, the little guy had told him outright they were from the same quadrant several times.

What the hell did that mean, anyway; quadrant? Wasn't that just one piece of a circle? Like, ninety degrees, one-fourth of a circle? Metro Man was pretty sure that was what quadrant meant. Unless Megamind was talking about the same celestial quadrant, and if so then 1) he read too many science fiction stories and 2) that was overwhelmingly redundant if their planets had orbited the same star. If you were in the same solar system then you were also in the same galactic quadrant because  _of course you were_. Referring to a planetary neighbor as living in the same galactic quadrant was like referring to your next-door neighbor as 'also from Australia'. It didn't exactly hint at a reliable measure of distance. You could be talking about someone that lives 5 feet away or any random spot in nearly three million square miles.

Metro Man sighed. Semantics aside, if he mentally put that exact situation to any other alien – give them purple skin, say, and show them to him now as opposed to when he had been a kid. He knew exactly what his reaction would be. He would instantly be interested, fascinated. 'How did you get here? How long have you been here? Do you like it here, or do you feel out of place, because I feel out of place all the time. Do you have urges you can't explain? Food allergies? Does the sun hurt your eyes? Are you too hot or cold?  _Talk to me.'_

Yet, because he'd known Megamind for so long, from a time in childhood where he was still forming social behaviors, he hadn't given it a second thought. Megamind had been the weird kid from the prison who showed up to the school in shackles and came and went with an armed guard and  _damn that sounded horrible now that he was an adult_. Why hadn't Wayne ever thought that was odd? How does a kid wind up in prison that early? And why hadn't he stopped even to wonder why Megamind looked so  ** _normal_** compared to the doll-like flimsy versions of himself walking around, and the females that looked so strange as they aged because something was weird about their color that made them look a little unhealthy to him. Damn it, he should have paid attention to those thoughts.

Come to think of it the thing he loved about Roxanne was how smart she was – that was the main feature he found attractive! If he just went on her looks he had to admit that only those big blue eyes and wide hips and the short hairstyle that made her head look like an independent entity from the rest of her body was appealing. She was still too pale and he felt like he had to guard her at all times, despite the fact that she played the game with Megamind so well that Metro Man had long since stopped worrying about that. She was smart and snarky, emotionally challenging, never let him get away with anything and demanded he pay her respect no matter how powerful he was, and expected him to earn his own respect from her in turn.

Come to think of it, Roxanne was one of two people that treated him like that.

Smiling to himself, Metro Man was about to see if he could locate Roxanne and Megamind to see what they were up to, but he blinked in mild discomfort when the sonic signal declaring an overseas emergency blared through the city at a wavelength nobody but Metro Man would be able to hear. Resigned, he made his way toward City Hall.

* * *

 

"Ah, Miss Ritchi-"

The second the bag was removed she sighed and rolled her eyes. "Do you honestly think I can't hear you yelling 'Places!' through a burlap sack? The fact that you can't see my ears does not mean they've stopped working." She tugged at one leg a little and frowned when she realized they were tied to the chair. She had really wanted to try and kick him today, too.

"Humor me, if you please," Megamind suggested politely. "Today is a special occasion."

"Is either video or audio on yet? Can anyone see or hear me outside this room?"

"Er… no. Why?"

Minion gaped while looking up at the screen they had currently displaying the news network that Roxanne worked for. "Sir, I think there's a bit of a problem." Megamind momentarily looked his way, but was distracted by his captive's sudden outburst.

"Good, because I have got to tell you I am getting really tired of this sh-" a white fluffy obstruction wandered aimlessly between her and Megamind, stunning her a little. "-eep?" She looked around herself at the obviously mechanical but still skillfully made bundles of white fluff that were mock-feeding on the carpet. "Sheep," she stated blankly. Then she asked him incredulously.  ** _"Sheep?"_**

Megamind crossed his arms defensively. "Yes. Why? Are you going to claim I'm predictable again?"

"Sir," Minion ventured again, motioning toward the screen.

"No, no… I can honestly say I did not expect sheep." Roxanne shook her head and sighed. "Why sheep?"

"Why not?" he defended, looking a bit put-out.

"Megamind, the schedule is not set in stone, ok? If you needed more time to come up with something a bit more dynamic than robotic sheep you could have just had Minion call me-"

"SIR!"

"What!?" both Megamind and Roxanne said, turning back to Minion.

The fish merely pointed up to the screen. Metro Man was prominently displayed, albeit at a great distance, assisting with what looked to be a natural disaster. There was a lot of smoke and glowing in the scene, but that could have been anything from a bomb hit to a wildfire to a particularly overzealous rock concert.

Roxanne blinked at this and looked with interest at Megamind, wondering what he would do.

"Where… is he?" the blue man asked hesitantly.

"Um, he's in Iceland, Sir."

"ICELAND! How long has he been there!?"

"Just got there, Sir. About two minutes ago," Minion sighed. "It looks like he'll be busy for a while. Flood basalt situation."

Megamind looked around him at the robo-sheep, his wonderful background setup, all the lights and effects and the music ready to blast into the city… and groaned. He muttered angrily while clenching his hands at his sides, feeling quite put out. He'd spent so much time on this one! And he didn't even have anyone to blame for it failing to kick off properly, unless magma flows counted, which they didn't. He hadn't even announced to anyone what was going on yet – he had been seconds away from it, though! So close!

On that thought he cooled off; it would have been  _far_  more devastating to have to call off a caper he had already begun and made public than to simply postpone it with the city none the wiser. After all, the magma wouldn't have waited for Megamind to finish his glorious speeches, would it? No, he'd actually been two minutes lucky today, as opposed to his usual two minutes damned. What could have been more humiliating than Metro Man merely snatching Miss Ritchi away and leaving him to pout while the hero rushed off to another landmass entirely without so much as a showman's acknowledgement?

The only really frustrating part of this was that he wouldn't even get to test his theories.

"Are… we doing the thing today?" Roxanne asked slowly. "I mean, do you want to wait or something?"

Megamind turned awkwardly back toward Roxanne. "Well, this is embarrassing."

The villain rubbed his still tense forehead with one hand while he reached behind him to turn off the largest switch that would shut down all of the most power-guzzling things he'd set up. He missed twice because he wasn't looking toward it, then the sound of an awful lot of coils and humming machinery wound down to near silence.

"No. We're not 'doing the thing today'," he conceded. It took a moment, but he pulled himself together and faced Roxanne, giving her a little flourished bow. "Even evil must know when to postpone a good party. With one of the guests of honor unaccounted for it would be in poor taste to continue. I do apologize for the inconvenience, Miss Ritchi. Minion, take her home if you please."

"Right away. Miss Ritchie," he apologized, pushing the plunger on the spray… which wheezed and failed to work. "Oooh… um. Out of spray, Sir."

Megamind sighed dramatically. "Then use the-"

"Don't you DARE hit me with that stick!" she hissed so coldly that both of them gave her a surprised look. "Last time I swear I had a concussion and I have important things to do tomorrow and ER visits are expensive! These kidnappings are inconvenient enough without the medical bills!"

"Um…" Megamind and Minion turned around and went into a huddle. "Do we have more spray stored here?" the blue man asked.

"Sorry, Sir. I don't think so."

"Well we can't just put the bag back on and drive her home conscious, her sense of direction is too good and she'll know where this lair is!"

Minion frowned. "You're sure I can't use the Forget-Me-Stick?"

"I can hear you." Roxanne said behind them.

Megamind sighed. "She's been a good sport, we owe one reasonable request I suppose. It would be more convenient though-"

"Hey, YOU don't hit me with that stick and I won't tell anyone about your sheep," she offered hopefully, giving them a little smile. "We can just pick this one up later? And you'll have more time to expand on the plan."

"Oh, thank you, Miss Ritchi!" Minion said appreciatively. "Sir, I can go to the nearest lair to get another can of spray."

Roxanne sighed in relief. "Go get more; I'll wait."

Megamind groaned. "That'll take at least an hour."

"Like you have something  _better_ to do than talk to me?" she asked simply. "I know the rules."

"THIS was never planned for so I don't have any rules for it!" Megamind groused, crossing his arms.

Roxanne rolled her eyes and sat up straighter. "So.. let's make some more. You can do that, right?"

Megamind, genuinely startled, stared at her in surprise.

"I'll go get you two some snacks for while you wait, okay?" Minion said cheerfully. He disappeared before either of them could argue, but Roxanne did shout a request for coffee.

Megamind started to argue, but he was left staring at the door Minion had shut with his mouth open. He shut his mouth and rubbed the back of his neck while he turned back to Roxanne. This was an… odd defeat. Or was it a defeat at all? He already knew he would have to establish new rules for the game were Metro Man was concerned, and in a way he was still testing his boundaries in how it was to be played in the future; merely with a different player. "Did you have a trade-off in mind?"

"For one thing we'll have to upgrade me from captive to guest. I don't think I can have my snacks while I'm tied to the chair," she suggested.

Megamind stood attentively with his arms crossed. "Oh, and I suppose the trade is you don't kick me in the serious bits?"

She laughed, a surprisingly pleasant sound to be sure. Megamind thought and didn't suppose she had ever laughed because of something he'd said before. "We'll call it a general 'I promise to behave' thing, ok? What about you?"

He mulled it over for a second and decided since she had already created a casual atmosphere, he may as well participate in it. It wasn't as if the caper was going to continue regardless, and Metro Man was most definitely not coming to get either one of them. Megamind pulled his rolling chair over and sat in it backwards, leaning his arms on the back rest and his chin on his arms. "I suppose if, during such times as you qualify as a guest, tying you to the chair would be a bit rude. Since you clearly prefer the spray over any other method of capture… we shall compromise. Therefore; no tying up guests, you behave, and in exchange for everything we discuss here being entirely confidential, Miss Ritchi, I will discontinue the Forget-Me-Stick for you. How does that sound?"

"Great, I can definitely agree to that one," she said.

Megamind laughed wryly. "Not that your boyfriend in tights will allow this to happen much anyway."

She groaned. "For the last time, Megamind; Metro Man and I are NOT involved. We're just friends."

"I am aware, though he feels compelled to protect you regardless, and thus you are still an effective captive. I am quite certain you were involved for some time, though, were you not?" he asked as he nodded to a Brain-bot, which began to untie her.

"WHY is everyone so interested in that? YES, okay? We were dating for a little while; it just didn't work out and we're still friends." Once her hands were free she brought them up and rubbed her wrists to be rid of the lingering pressure. "First of all, he's just not my type. Second, there was no real emotional connection. I like Metro Man and he is very much a good guy, but that doesn't change the fact that he never took any real interest in my day-to-day life. There was no interaction aside from necessity."

"Really?" he asked, interested. If she could, even inadvertently, give him clues on how Metro Man behaved in a relationship then this day might not be a waste after all! "What else?"

She stopped and gave him a suspicious glare. "That confidentiality thing goes both ways, right?"

"Of course; all rules work both ways," he said seriously, then teased her. "So if you ever have me captive you are forbidden from hitting me with sticks. It's only fair."

Roxanne laughed again and Megamind was surprised at how nice it felt to be the one causing it. "Why are you interested anyway?"

"Mere curiosity. You seemed like the perfect match; the one thing in shool I never really questioned was how much he adored you. He didn't miss the chance to ask you to every dance, talk to you every day, every class when we were assigned into groups he would scramble to be near you. To be honest it was annoying how much of his attention you took away from me," he said.

Her eyes locked onto his, profoundly interested. Good. She was almost in reporter mode. If he got her there and knocked her out of it quickly enough she'd be off-guard and he could plant little ideas that would simmer there and give him an edge in their interaction. Wouldn't the hero be surprised the next time he ridiculed Megamind in private and Roxanne defended him? If he did that. It was possible, Megamind supposed.

She tried to recover by teasing him back. "It almost sounds like you had a crush on him yourself, Megamind."

Theatrics; put on a show. Megamind lowered his head just enough to settle the bridge of his nose on his arms, hiding his expression from her while he appeared to think it over. He looked away just as he saw the interest peaking back up and didn't speak until she prompted him.

"Megamind?"

Ah, that sounded deeply inquisitive. Somewhat apologetic too. Should he go for the pity ploy? Why not? It wouldn't be lying, after all.

"Nothing like that, Miss Ritchi," he said plainly. "But how would you feel if you were one of only two aliens on the whole planet and, despite you trying to bring up the subject several times, the other one never considered that subject, or really  _you,_  worthy of conversation. If the only other human in a strange world saw you on a daily basis for  _years_  and never, not once, tried to offer any sort of council; if only because they fit in a bit better than you did."

"He did it to you too," she said, blindsided.

Megamind huffed. "I believe that's my line. I hadn't considered he'd been so dismissive to you as well, not with the way he treats you in public at least."

She winced. "It wasn't that. He wasn't dismissive per se. It was more like once he had me there was no point in doing the romantic stuff anymore. I mean, it'd be normal to fall into that 'to each their own' routine much later after we'd been together for ten years or so, but not right off the bat. The second he had me it felt like there was no reason to keep up with me anymore. There was no more effort involved. He just wanted me nearby and interacted with me when he wanted something or thought I wanted something. Otherwise he pretty much treated me like an appliance; something you want to have in your house but don't think of unless you need it to function for you at that time."

*If he stayed with you constantly he wouldn't be able to protect you from threats at the border,* Megamind thought to himself. He found himself angry on Metro Man's behalf.

She continued. "And I get that there are emergencies and people need saving, but it was like flipping a switch with him. There was never a 'Gotta go,' or 'Be right back,' or even a single 'Sorry.' He just disappeared. Mid-statement, sometimes. There and gone."

"That may be accurate, but it is also unfair," Megamind pointed out calmly. "Much as he may look it; Metro Man is  _not_  human; he is an alien. An entirely divergent creature that would certainly have his own instincts and desires as far as courtship and interaction with a mate would go. Maybe how he treated you is normal for his species. Judging how he behaves in a romantic relationship by human standards with no compromise on satisfying the desires of both people involved is just unreasonable and, really, somewhat cruel."

"Wow… I never actually thought of it that way." She said guiltily. "I mean it's so easy to forget he's not just another human until he flies off to save the day."

Megamind lifted his head and mused aloud, "It seems to be a benefit to his social life that he at least physically resembles humans, but it may be a detriment as well because that makes people expect him to  _act_ human as well when he isn't one. I hadn't thought of that before." That was honest. "I think I was too jealous of how well he fit in to consider he might be metaphorically wearing a mask all the time. What natural behaviors and instincts has he been trained out of expressing?"

Roxanne looked guiltily at the floor. Megamind had definitely hit both of them with that one. "What about you?" she asked.

Megamind took his turn giving her a suspicious look. "No nosy reporter skills," he warned.

"Confidential. Promise."

* * *

 

When Minion dropped off their snacks and coffee Roxanne had conspicuously stopped what she had been saying, mid-sentence, and he left to the sound of nervous laughter behind him. Whatever they were talking about he was going to ask Megamind when he got back. It took less than an hour before he returned, and when he did he noticed Metro Man hovering near one of the upper windows of the lair. Minion grinned and waved at him, calling him down.

Metro Man looked… ruffled was polite. It had clearly been a battle with nature that day.

He motioned toward the floor that Megamind and Roxanne were on and simply waited for Minion to explain.

"Oh, uh… there was going to be a caper today, but we kidnapped Miss Ritchi just before you were called away. Since you were clearly unable to make the appointment, with a very acceptable reason, there was a discussion and then a coffee break and… well it's all a bit odd." Minion said. He hoped that Megamind had taken the time to put the sheep away by now, though. "What were they talking about?"

"Uh… High school," Metro Man said in bewilderment.

"That makes sense," Minion nodded. "You should go and, uh, rest up. You look a bit-"

"Singed." Metro Man settled for flatly.

"Yes, that. Don't worry, I'll make sure Miss Ritchi gets home safely. We'll just have to reschedule."

"You guys actually do have a schedule, don't you?" Metro Man drawled, shaking his head.

"Goodnight, Metro Man." Minion said cordially as he turned toward the lair.

The hero took a breath and looked in on Roxanne one last time before flying off, feeling a bit useless. Apparently, if he didn't show up Megamind and Roxanne's problems just solved themselves.

 

 


	8. Choice of Weapons

**Choice of Weapons**

_“You can figure out what the villain fears by his choice of weapons.” ~ Connie Brockway, The Bridal Season_

* * *

The past week had been interesting to say the least, starting with the failed caper that had honestly been one of the most enjoyable social events of Roxanne’s winter thus far.  That said so many things about her recent social life that she dared not dwell on it too much, but she did have to admit that back when they were kids she and Megamind had always seemed to get along relatively well if Wayne Scott wasn’t in their vicinity, no matter what he’d been called at the time.  Inevitably whenever he showed up to ‘defend’ her Megamind would bristle, Wayne would respond, a banter would break out, and she’d wander off and leave them to their theatrical bullshit.  Sometimes they’d glance back at her and she got the impression they might have been trying to entertain her somehow, despite the fact that she thought it was childish and annoying.

Roxanne had been pleasantly surprised when a woman had called her the morning of the most recent kidnapping to warn her that Megamind was planning to kidnap her.  Despite Roxanne being well aware of that and providing the woman with blithe thanks she persisted in trying to get Roxanne to go somewhere safe.  Clearly this woman had no idea just how crucial it was to Roxanne’s career that she keep playing along – not only did it make her so valuable to the station that they paid her enough for a corner apartment with a balcony, but it provided far more opportunities to speak directly with Metro Man than she would normally be afforded with their respective work schedules.  He HAD to talk to her, at least as he flew her off to either work or home or, rarely, to the inevitable ambulance squad after Megamind was thwarted to treat minor scrapes and bruises.

Getting kidnapped on a regular basis made Roxanne Ritchi the only reporter in the city with steady access to exclusive Hero interviews, and occasionally villainous ones too.  That was a kind of job security very few ever had in this business.  Thus, she couldn’t afford anyone interfering with the game, no matter how well-meant, and did her polite reporter-level best to tell the woman that she could take care of herself but thanks for caring and if you get too meddlesome I will end you.

Even the EMTs that treated her occasional scrapes afterward didn’t worry about her being truly injured anymore; this woman would just have to learn that the only person Megamind actually intended to harm was impervious to it. 

Figuring out who that phone number belonged to had been a bit of a shock – a Dr. Vanessa Mardling at the new Metro Man museum.  HOW the woman had figured out the schedule for the day was a question she would have to investigate on her own later, especially since Dr. Mardling was apparently the Metro Man expert there NOT the Megamind one.  Roxanne was positive Metro Man didn’t know about the schedule, too.  She had either gotten the schedule from Minion somehow or had worked out a pattern that Roxanne hadn’t figured out yet.  Either way she was currently a threat to Roxanne’s career; so, this Dr. Mardling needed to either become an ally real fast or learn to mind her own business.

She kept these things in the back of her mind while she pondered the MAIN thing she was trying to work out. 

Something was _definitely_ going on between Metro Man and Megamind, but she wasn’t sure what.

Metro Man had clumsily tipped her off the day he had clearly _allowed Megamind to escape_ , which had never happened before.  Yes, Megamind occasionally managed to get away while Metro Man was busy with Roxanne or something else like herding civilians or cleaning up still active robots, but he had never clearly _stalled for time_ before.  She didn’t really like to be suspicious of her friends… but she was a reporter and occasionally got suspicious of her friends.  And they knew that.

Which meant she couldn’t just ask Metro Man what was going on.  If he wanted her to know what was going on, or even just wouldn’t mind her knowing, he would have already told her.  So, it was a secret.

Roxanne had a problem _conceptually_ with her friends having secrets from her.

Currently Roxanne was sitting next to her balcony window, which she could not open due to the layer of plastic keeping her heating bill from exceeding real numbers.  A steaming mug of tea in hand was keeping her calm while she mused to herself on how to go about solving this problem.  Staring at the snow provided very little in the way of inspiration.  The lights she’d put up around the outside of the door, though, at least gave her a warm feeling while she thought things through.  She mentally drifted back to the last kidnapping again.

After Minion had returned with the spray and Megamind had bid her a sufficiently polite farewell to keep their impromptu heart-to-heart from being unreasonably awkward she had woken up in her apartment.  On the couch, as usual, because Minion seemed to believe that breaking into her actual home was fine but going into a woman’s bedroom without permission would just be rude.  She’d had a glass of wine to help the lingering fuzziness from the knockout spray be less unpleasant and mused on everything they had talked about – especially how Megamind had essentially confirmed one of her long-held suspicions about him.

He desperately craved Metro Man’s attention.

The villain had played it off as basic jealousy and disappointment that Metro Man seemed to have written the blue man off as unworthy.  Of course he was trying to lead her into thinking what he wanted; that was a pretty normal part of their interaction and was to be expected.  The sympathy act was not going to work; Roxanne had known Megamind way too long to believe he took anything less than pleasure out of his chosen career and enjoyed the hell out of their game. 

There was that moment, though, when Megamind was resting his face on the back of the chair and pretending to think (as if it took him long enough to be melodramatic- she knew better) when his faked brooding looked just a little too honest.  Smart as he was in terms of manipulation, the guy just couldn’t seem to keep the truth off his face if it bothered him, and he was far less intelligent in terms of his emotions than literally everything else. Both of the aliens she knew had that problem, actually. It seemed to her as if Megamind, and Metro Man for that matter, were still mentally stuck in their early twenties at the latest.  Some people just didn’t mature at the same rate as the rest of the world and they both reeked of late adolescent uncertainty sometimes.

Maybe their respective species matured slower than humans in terms of emotional understanding, or may not have the same standards of emotional maturity that Roxanne understood indicated adult thinking on Earth.  Or maybe they were just perpetually immature people – those existed too.

Roxanne was positive that Megamind really _was_ bothered that Metro Man had snubbed him; enough that it slipped onto his face.  And as usual Megamind was unaware that he wore his heart on his sleeve; he was terrible at hiding how he was feeling.  At least from her.

Not long after the drop-off and around Roxanne’s second glass of wine, Metro Man had stopped by to make sure that Megamind had, well… followed the rules.  Roxanne had the privilege of listing the new rules for him and earned some annoyed grumbling in response before he left in something of a huff.  She’d invited him to stay and rest for a bit after cleaning up that little lake of fire problem.  Not that the Icelanders had NEEDED him for that, he had pointed out wryly – they had mostly had it under control by the time he got there.  They lived over a mantle plume and already knew how to deal with it so the whole time there he had basically been following the orders of those that were already on-site and he had been merely fulfilling the role of heavy equipment. 

He wouldn’t stay that evening, even after she’d promised there would be no interviews for the station and he could be officially off-duty and just be Wayne for a while.  He’d just left in something of a snit.  Was Metro Man disappointed that they hadn’t played the game that day, too?  Or was he disturbed that Roxanne hadn’t actually needed him to rescue her that time?  He ought to know by now Megamind didn’t mean _her_ any harm, she was just the bait.

If he had stayed she would have just asked him.  He never was very good at lying.  She’d been able to read his face like a book since fifth grade. 

…which was likely why he’d been avoiding her all week.  He hadn’t behaved like this since just after the breakup seven years ago.  Calls were either missed (i.e. ignored) or short and to the point.  Invites to meet for lunch or coffee before work were brushed off.  He insisted that everything was fine despite the tightness to his tone.  It was like her friend had become her Ex again.  So he was either mad at her specifically for something or didn’t want her figuring something out before he was ready to talk about it.

Given that Megamind had skipped an appointment right after a failed caper it only made Roxanne think that Metro Man’s weird mood swing had something to do with a certain villain.

Or the Museum design, she snorted.  If someone had consulted Metro Man on the design and he’d approved it she would have been surprised.  That damned statue…  It was like Metro City was trying to create their own Colossus of Rhodes.  Thankfully the rise in the popularity of pants in the 2000 year interim prevented her from having to look up at something that she would very likely recognize as painfully inaccurate, physically.  There was no excuse for it, really.  He was already on the Metro City Seal and had his likeness plastered everywhere from advertisements to cartoon characters – most of which without his consent.  Everyone just figured their generous hero wouldn’t mind it.

Roxanne had no idea how he could stand to be the center of all that _insanity._   It’d certainly drive her to distraction and a perpetually foul mood, no question.  Her career paying off and leading to general fame was one thing, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, after all; but being the center of an entire city’s Hero Worship would drive her to drink.  She’d have hidden in her apartment with a bottle of whiskey and a straw and refused to come out.

“And now I’m thinking like my grandfather,” she laughed to herself, then thought, *Too bad drinking does nothing for Metro Man.*

She really did want to know what was going on, but she’d hold off on it for now at least and give her friend some time to decide to tell her on his own.  She was curious as hell.  However, it was clearly something that upset him and she could wait a while before intruding on what Metro Man had decided was a private matter.  It just galled her that it was a private matter between Metro Man and _Megamind_.

The possibilities swirled in her head.  Was Metro Man reanalyzing how he should treat Megamind in battles?  That implied Megamind was either changing his tactics and posed a danger to everyone, herself included, or his general threat level was being reduced.  Was it that Metro Man was questioning how necessary fighting Megamind actually was?  THAT wouldn’t be surprising, but if he was planning on trying to reform Megamind then 1) that was unlikely to work period, 2) Metro Man would definitely need her help and, 3) they’d have to enlist Minion first because he could act as a moral tether and knew Megamind better than anyone else did.  Had Metro Man accidentally hurt Megamind during the last battle?  It wouldn’t be the first time and he wouldn’t be likely to hide it from her, so that couldn’t be it.  Did Megamind have blackmail material on Metro Man?  Or if that was reversed and Megamind had asked Metro Man not to tell anyone… meddling would basically force Metro Man to break a promise or a deal, which would legitimately piss off Megamind, and THAT would end spectacularly badly.

Damn, but she had a hunch the blue alien would be a serious threat to the planet as a whole if he got well and truly furious.  Like omnicidal maniac ‘screw-this-planet-I’ll-find-a-new-one’ levels of destruction.

She winced and urged herself to stop speculating.

Wayne had a week, tops.  THEN she would meddle.  Because it was driving her spare.

In the meantime Roxanne would go and see this Dr. Mardling and figure out the friend or foe thing and act accordingly to preserve her privacy, the Game, and her career.

* * *

It wasn’t quite snowing that morning. 

It seemed to be putting in a good effort to snow, but all it really accomplished was very dense and icy fog with a problem staying fog for very long.  What fat mist didn’t slowly fall to the ground after solidifying stuck to everything it contacted like spray paint by virtue of being not-quite-frozen yet still cold enough to chill to the bone; both of which made everything dangerously slippery.  It wasn’t quite snow but managed to be more frustrating than snow itself could ever have been.  Not only were you still going to get irritatingly cold and wet even if you had dressed accordingly, but you couldn’t see five feet in front of you either. 

Snow, at least, had the decency to remain somewhat clumped and generally only hit you from above, not hover in the air like miniscule depth charges.

It was perfect Megamind-proof weather.  Wherever he was anyone familiar with him knew he was damn well going to wait for this foreboding miasma to pass unless the odds were higher that he would die from cabin fever.  Even then he might have chosen the latter as the less painful method of expiring.

Wearing glasses turned five feet worth of visibility into less than half an inch due to the aforementioned spray paint effect, so Dr. Mardling found herself leading Bernard along by the hand toward the museum.  He grumbled and squinted into the pervading greyness, having given up and put his glasses away in his bag before even leaving his car, which effectively blinded him for all practical purposes.  While Dr. Mardling wore glasses too, her prescription was less than one fourth the strength of her assistants’ and she could still tell the difference between blurs that were stationary and blurs that were moving either toward or away from her without them.  Bernard wouldn’t have been able to tell her the difference between a firefly, a star, and a lighthouse in this, even if it was dark enough for stars.

Regardless of his outer persona, it spoke very clearly of Bernard’s character that the older woman was currently wearing his coat – he had wordlessly tossed it on her the moment they’d left the vehicle and ignored her completely when she tried to give it back.

“Is there a reason you need me for this?” Bernard complained.

“No, I just don’t want to do it by myself,” she said, trying to shut him up with blunt honesty.

It seemed to work until they got to the door at least.  Vanessa frowned at the door, lost in thought for a moment.  Was this really a good idea?  True, she had an obligation to inform her patient of the test results, but was this betraying Megamind’s confidentiality as his doctor too?  If Megamind or even Minion had found out and called her on it she wouldn’t be able to argue.  This was just one of those things where she knew she was both right and wrong and waiting to figure out where the sides weighed in would only make the situation worse than it already was.

She HAD to tell Metro Man.  Megamind had already called ‘not it’ anyway.

“Thanks for coming, Bern.”

“Bernard,” he corrected flatly, but walked inside when she held the door open.  He hadn’t even complained when she stood outside musing, as if he already knew what was going on.  He probably did, the asshole. 

Bernard didn’t even seem surprised to see Metro Man waiting for them in the Lobby.

The large alien gave him a nod.  “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” Bernard greeted when Vanessa didn’t immediately reply to him and wrung her hands in her scarf instead.  He grumbled and snatched her hand, pulling her to the elevator so they could get to the office quickly.  Metro Man didn’t join them, preferring to float up to the next floor instead, and while they were in the metal box anyway he took his chance.  “Sure you want to do this?”

“Yes.”

“Then quit acting like a scolded kid and do it.”

“Ass,” she said.  “Only you wouldn’t be afraid of pissing off Megamind.  Just because he likes what you did with the exhibits-”

“I don’t think he’s as much of a threat as everyone believes.”

“You’re right,” Dr. Mardling imitated Bernard’s drawl.  “I should fail to see how anyone else’s discomfort is _my_ problem.”

For an instant she thought she saw a slight upturn to the stoic man’s lips, then the elevator opened and it was gone. 

Metro Man was waiting just outside the elevator, but frowned when he saw her face.  “Is something wrong?”

“I work with an asshole Vulcan,” she sighed before stalking to her office.  Even Metro Man’s mildly accusing look at Bernard didn’t calm her nerves.

Once inside Bernard sat down and set his laptop on the table, pulling up the information that Dr. Mardling had collected just in case Metro Man needed visual aids.  “Do you know why we’re here?”

Metro Man scratched his neck, looking a bit awkward. “Ah, no.”

Dr. Mardling smiled a bit nervously.  “We need to tell you what we’ve discovered about the biological differences and similarities between you and Megamind.  There’s a lot of information and it might take a while, so-“

“So why isn’t he here?” Metro Man asked.  “Shouldn’t he be part of this too?”

“He already knows.  Figured it out before we did,” Bernard said.  “Had a little fit over it-”

 _“Bernard,”_ Dr. Mardling warned while the hero gave the man a concerned look.

“Well, he did.”

She let out a gentle breath as opposed to sighing and began to explain.

* * *

Megamind scowled as he watched the video feed from the bugs he’d put all over the museum.  Hacking in would have been a simple matter, but their surveillance system just wasn’t up to par and missed some crucial places he really wanted to monitor in the event someone tried to steal what he definitively still considered HIS stuff. 

Metro Man had met the good doctor some time ago and, despite not feeling particularly driven to stop them doing it, he rather resented that the woman was spilling everything to his enemy already.  And though he was loathe to admit it to himself… Megamind felt like he’d been let off the hook in a huge way.  The only alternative was Megamind _himself_ explaining the situation to his nemesis and he really, _really_ did NOT want to do that.

Megamind had neither the courage nor the patience to explain it himself, and he would rather not be there when the inane questions started flying.  He would defer the task to the good Doctor and hope that Metro Man didn’t react too badly to finding out he shared genes with a villain he’d ostracized since naptime had been a regular part of their days.

In the meantime, he had something to do.

Megamind just could not be comfortable with this situation until he worked out his place in this instinct-driven territorial mess.  Being raised where he was that was one of the things his fellows had ingrained in him as deeply as they could; ALWAYS know where you stand.  He’d spent the previous night going through his memories and searching for clues again; the only tool he really seemed to have that had proven to be helpful was hindsight and being able to view his memories objectively.  There wasn’t much, to be honest.  Most of it was stuff he already knew.  Nothing he hadn’t already taken into account as far as their rivalry went.

It wasn’t until he was musing on the incident that had caused this whole cascade of discovery that Megamind honed in on something to search for specifically; the small lapse in his usually perfect memory that had been caused by Metro Man growling from afar, the noise that had triggered his injury, and prompted Metro Man to meddle as he had never meddled before.

So he searched not for memories, but small lapses in memory.  Perhaps instinctive reactions had occurred before and he’d merely written them off as unimportant.

Megamind found two of them, and they were old memories indeed.

Thrice Metro Man had come to his aid unexpectedly and, in two of those instances – the ones that coincided for the brief lapses, the man had been nowhere near Megamind at the time.  Once occurred during Anatomy class when those vapid bullies had him cornered wielding scalpels in what Megamind still wasn’t entirely sure had been an empty threat.  The other had been in their younger days just before Metro Boy had flown off with the little Schoolhouse.  He’d been stung by a wasp on the shoulder and it had hurt far more than it would have pained any of the other children, he was certain.  He hadn’t cried as such, but Metro Boy appeared out of nowhere and pinched what venom he could out and blown cold on the badly swollen purple welt before Megamind could gather enough wherewithal to protest.

After all such events there had come a common social problem.

Those that had been present for the memory lapse later teased him for ‘whining’. 

He didn’t recall doing it, but Megamind knew now he must have made a noise.  He was a male of the species, after all, if not a territorial one.  It only made sense he’d be able to sound a call of sorts too.  It might even be a trait all his people shared.  A species-wide alarm system.  The territorial males would warn their wards away from battles and the blue people could call their defender to them if needed.  The only explanation was that his memory lapsed due to instinctive responses taking over and suppressing conscious choice.

It made him feel a bit better that the reflex made sense.  No matter how fast it is, stopping to think could get you killed.

A big brain is often a detriment to evolution.  Biologically speaking they are monstrously expensive.  If you have a big brain it’s because it was worth the energy and time expenditure to make and maintain it, even if only just.  Simple, fast reactions are just a much better investment for survival unless critical thinking is a near requirement.  The human reaction to sounds at 19 Hertz was again significant here. 

Physically feeling a fear reaction that makes you reflexively bolt when a Tiger growls in your general vicinity is a LOT more useful than waiting for a brain to process the thought of, “Oh, look a Tiger… maybe I should run or find a weapon or something to defend myself with,” especially when one would have to wait for visual confirmation before that occurred.  Stop to think too much, and… you’re a cat snack.  Even if all it did in the modern day human was cause hallucinations and perceived hauntings when air conditioners malfunctioned enough to create a sense of dread in that general area, the trait had been so useful up until very, very recently that it still functioned perfectly. 

Sometimes, for survival’s sake, a body had to wrest control of itself away from the conscious mind.

So maybe his brain DID shut down during sex to ensure he actually did it once in a while instead of philosophizing himself into bachelorhood indefinitely.  That possibility actually made him proud in a very weird way.

Although, _had_ he instinctively called the territorial male to his aid?  That was… somewhat embarrassing.  Metro Man had simply appeared next to him as if by magic.  At that point in their rivalry Megamind was unaware the hero possessed super-speed despite the fact that their general animosity, plotting, and gameplay had already begun.  Hindsight was a wonderful thing in that regard; Metro Man hadn’t even considered the risk in revealing an unknown power to a potential enemy.  He had simply heard a call and responded as if he were pulled there by instinct himself.

THAT could be a supremely useful tool.  Metro Man may be able to subdue him by sounding his own warning call, but if Megamind could sound a call of his own to summon Metro Man to his side no matter what he was doing at the time?  He could definitely use that.  He could think of lots of gloriously evil ways to use that.

Would that noise work if he tried it again?

Megamind frowned, wondering if that was wise for his rather fragile ego at the moment.  It made sense to try it, but the thought still made his gut churn with wounded pride already sore from the very personal matters Metro Man had been poking his nose into recently.

Call _Metro Man_ for _help_!? Even for the sake of experimentation?  Just to prove he _could_?

Megamind grumbled unhappily and stood to pace.

It wasn’t FAIR, but he HAD been raised by humans.  In not exactly the best environment for sexual education beyond the strictly practical ‘tab A/slot B’ instruction along with an absurdly heavy dose of conquest mentality (i.e. **_never_** _be the slot_ ).  Regardless of basic logic Megamind now felt himself as _less of a male_ than the brute, which was stupid and flatly incorrect.  Metro Man couldn’t inseminate a female alone either.  The fact that Megamind’s body was designed to be imbued by a male didn’t make him any less biologically male himself and he knew it.  It was flat-out necessary for reproduction for his species, it wasn’t even a mere option for those that preferred it or just liked to indulge like it was for humans.  His species simply operated in a different tab and slot orientation.

For reproductive purposes humans had tab A and slot B.  Megamind and Metro Man’s people had tab A, slot B and tab C, and slot D with the blue males acting as a conduit and activator in between A and D.  Simple, not at all difficult to understand, and it served so many practical purposes that Megamind was amazed that his was the first species he’d seen that configuration in.  Hell, the ability for one’s genes to be passed on to offspring even if the sire had died weeks ago was so insanely useful that Earth’s simple two-gender system now seemed vastly less sophisticated as a survival strategy.  He understood this all perfectly.

But **nurture** did play a rather large part of any creature’s life regardless of instinct and the knowledge that logic provided, so this whole thing still felt like an attack on Megamind’s inherent _maleness_ regardless of whether or not it made any logical sense.  His initial plot to start testing his boundaries and his place in this territorial, three-gendered, insane instinct-driven social mess had been thwarted by molten basalt a while ago.  Since then Megamind had tried coming up with more plans to try and figure out what his role was and how he could metaphorically poke the bear just enough to get a reaction that would give him more insight… but aside from trying to re-enact a plot that Miss Ritchi was already aware of this was all he had to go on.

Unless he wanted to go for broke and try and leave the territory outright, and THAT thought made something strange and unsettling swirl at the back of his thoughts like a specter; a vague sense of menace Megamind was certain was intended to keep him right where he was unless there was more danger inside than outside.  And there _wasn’t_ , honestly.  Metro Man was, for all intents and purposes, a perfectly adequate guardian from a physical standpoint.  They had verbally, physically, and mentally battled time and time again and the fact remained that Metro Man had **never** laid hands, or powers, on Megamind with the intention to truly harm.  Accidents didn’t count, especially if he made up for it.

The only reason Megamind was considering leaving the brute’s territory at all was due to curiosity over what the consequences of that would be and not due to an actual desire to leave it.  And he knew roughly where that barrier was, too, once he paused to think about it. 

Those industrial places where the air tasted unpleasantly different and made him pause.  He’d noticed them in some places in the outskirts of the city when he was younger and had to scrounge for metal in scrapyards and unattended storage areas for old construction equipment.  That taste always made him pause with his mouth open and something in the back of his throat, way up high just at the roof of his mouth, burned like he’d swallowed something foul.  At first he assumed it must be chemicals that didn’t bother humans but were detrimental to him, as many of these places were near landfills or treatment plants.  It was VERY unpleasant to him and he’d always left quickly, retreating back to the inner city areas.

Now Megamind knew they were scent markers.  He hadn’t noticed them until he was around fifteen so perhaps that was when he’d either gotten old enough to sense them, or that was when Metro Man had started putting them there.  It even made sense they would be in those chemical-laden areas because those districts would naturally be in the outer areas of a city where people didn’t normally want to live.

“How did he not know he was doing it?” Megamind mused aloud.  He seriously doubted Metro Man was so dense that he wouldn’t realize he was spreading scent on things.  Megamind certainly didn’t recall doing it himself; yet another blow to his ego, because often with territorial creatures there could be overlap between those of different hierarchies.  But no, it didn’t seem to Megamind as if his type of male had territories at all; he simply lived inside one, albeit with the clear right to his own private space within.

And THAT was the true reason for the mutually exclusive lairs.  It must be.  The more Megamind considered their behavior all their lives the more instinct he kept finding.  So MANY of the rules of the game were them figuring out their natural behaviors and heeding them to mutual benefit.

They’d been dancing around outright flirting for decades whether they knew it or not.

And Megamind hadn’t left.  Even though, on some level, he had known where the boundary was.

This begged the question of how the scent was spread along the boundaries in the first place.  The comical image of the Hero of Metrocity getting the sudden urge to pee on things on the edge of town was entertaining to say the least, if unlikely.  Someone definitely would have gotten pictures of that and posted it online by now.  There were an awful lot of pictures of Metro Man rearranging things in those areas, though.  Perhaps it was his hands?  That would certainly explain the hulking man’s occasional habit of deciding to Feng Shui the hell out of a scrap or lumberyard without asking the owners.  Nobody minded this because they assumed he was being randomly helpful or keeping mounds of stuff from collapsing – preventing disasters before they happened.  He probably even believed that himself, rather than realize he was heeding an instinct to _touch ALL the things_ in that area.

So… Megamind knew where the boundaries were, roughly.  He felt safer knowing this, as it meant he could avoid them if he got the sense Metro Man was going to enforce some sort of ‘you-shall-not-pass’ rule.  Once again his human upbringing rubbed his ego raw over this, despite the fact that he wasn’t intellectually bothered by it at all.

The main problem was that Megamind had no ability to fight it if he wanted to.  Nearly any problem could be solved with logic and reasoning if one thought long enough, except a physical battle with Metro Man.  This was something he could not counter because it hit him as purely a problem of physics and not one that could be reasoned with.  You can’t breathe rock, you can’t change the past, you can’t damage Metro Man.  As far as his reaction to the scent itself went, how could he fight or logically explain away a feeling; a reflex?  Anything would have been easier for him to deal with than this invisible taste of foreboding that circled the city and inevitably forced him to turn back, slinking back to the safety of his home – well within the boundary – like a kitten huddling under a porch from a storm. 

He didn’t feel endangered or trapped, it just felt _belittling_.  Maybe their culture might have thought of it differently, regarding the boundary as a protective shield rather than a wire-top fence… but Megamind had begun to internalize the belief that he had _always been in prison_ ; he just hadn’t **known** it.  And that was mortifying when he considered the identity of his Warden.

He hadn’t felt this helpless since he was too young and not yet developed enough to be stronger than the average human, back when every single person he passed that was his own size or larger could have overpowered him and he was dreadfully aware of how much words affected the violent and simple. 

Everything he’d discovered pointed to a very real and inescapable fact; until otherwise tested (and he was very reluctant to test it, lest he be proven irrevocably correct) Megamind had no other option but to assume he belonged to Metro Man and there was nothing he could do about it – not without grave risk of consequences he could only guess at.

Megamind felt awkward and anxious about it all and didn’t know how to cope.  He needed to have SOME kind of power here, some tools to use to give himself more of a status than ‘landlocked potential DNA distributer’.

It really seemed as if his best option for a weapon might be to test the ‘whining’ thing.

Could he really call Metro Man to him?

Did he want to attempt it?

What if it didn’t work and he could only produce the sound when legitimately frightened or hurt?  What if it DID work and he interrupted a rescue?  Metro Man would likely be drawn away from a human in need to attend to one of his own species’ calls.  Without a damned good reason for using it, especially if he caused someone to get hurt by pulling the hero away, Megamind was positive the man would be _furious_ with him; one of the very few things that he knew beyond a doubt would truly earn him the brute’s anger was hurting one of his precious citizens if even by proxy.

Damn it, he’d have to time it carefully, then… or just do it in one of his sound-proofed lairs for practice first.

Sighing, Megamind looked back up at the screen.  Dr. Mardling and Bernard had been talking to Metro Man for quite a long time now, pointing to things on the computer screen and gesturing emphatically and giving him pause to think.  Megamind usually didn’t use the audio – he rarely needed it if he was looking at the images.  He could read lips and muse to himself at the same time thank you very much.  Now, though, he wanted to hear the voices.  Perhaps he’d be able to judge how Metro Man was reacting emotionally before the results of the conversation hit Megamind later at the end of a white-gloved fist.

He at least needed to know if the brute was angry, because that was never pleasant.

To maintain the illusion of control to himself at least, Megamind slammed his fist onto the volume control instead of merely pushing it because he didn’t want to see his hand shaking.

* * *

“Thank you for telling me all this,” Metro Man finally said after taking two coffees worth of time to mull it over.  “And Megamind already knows?”

Dr. Mardling nodded.  “He put the puzzle together long before I did.  His moniker really is very accurate.”

Metro Man pointedly looked to Bernard.  “What kind of fit?”

Dr. Mardling winced, having really hoped he would have forgotten that bit.

“Mild panic attack,” the other man said while pushing up his glasses.  “Minion called to ask Vanessa what to do.  Seems like he flipped right the fuck out.”

Metro Man stood, setting his cup down on the table and speaking in an unreadable tone.  “I’d better go and see how he’s dealing, then.”

* * *

 The sudden disappearance from the screen could only have been achieved by the man using his Super Speed.  Panicked, Megamind shoved himself away from the console and whipped around before he could stop himself.  Why was he rushing over so fast!?

His first thought was that Metro Man was going to simply materialize behind him and put him in a hold, then refuse to release him until he did whatever the brute wanted just to gain freedom.  It wouldn’t have been the first time, though admittedly the first time in a long damned time, that particular interrogation tactic had been used.  Idiot Jock Headlock had forced everything from admissions of guilt to gossip to the locations of hidden tools out of Megamind in their younger years.

The empty lair seemed threateningly quiet with no Metro Man in sight and only seemed more foreboding with every passing second.  What was taking him so long?!  Had he been caught up in a rescue on the way?

Megamind turned in a full circle, waiting, eyes wide and tense and expecting at any instant to find himself immobilized.  Not that he was afraid of his enemy, it was only that…

Well, he had no real defense for that one.  With everything as it was Megamind felt unbalanced and uncertain and ill-equipped to handle an outright confrontation just now.  He had expected the brute to brood over it all for a while or at least confide in someone else first, likely Miss Ritchi, before demanding Megamind’s opinion.

Minutes passed.  Metro Man definitely should have been here by now.  The longer the waiting went on the more Megamind wished he would just get it over with already. 

“Where are you?” he asked apparent nothingness, hating the tremor in his voice.

A knock on the upper floor windows startled him so badly he leapt backward into the drafting table and hit his shoulder.  Megamind rubbed the spot uncertainly as he stared at the shadowed figure, cape flapping heroically behind him.

“We need to talk.”

“ ** _Do_** we?” Megamind sneered instantly, because he’d be damned if he was going to give in to an _order_ like that.  He flipped a switch that made lights on the outside of the warehouse turn on so he could see more than a shadow while he yelled at it.  Metro Man didn’t even have the decency to blink from the sudden brightness.

Metro Man frowned and put his hand on the glass.  The confusion only lasted until those wandering blue eyes spotted the screens where Dr. Mardling and Bernard were clearing up after the meeting, then the man deflated a little.  “Are you going to let me in?” he asked, carefully keeping his tone polite and not the pre-banter hero tone he’d used before.

“That depends; do you intend to break in anyway if I don’t?”

“No-“

“I do NOT believe you!”  Megamind admitted to himself he was panicking a little and antagonizing was probably not the BEST course of action at the moment.  He was still angry over the last time Metro Man had come into his lair without permission, and asking permission NOW seemed far more like condescension than a polite request.  It hadn’t even occurred to Megamind that he would be given the option of refusing again once that rule had been broken; his lair had been invaded and it felt like a permanent arrangement.

Besides, Metro Man had been blundering his way into Megamind’s business like a force of nature thus far, so why would he stop now?

“Please.”

“Actions and words, old friend.  Nice try.  Still NO.”  When Metro Man frowned but didn’t break in and instead seemed to be waiting for Megamind to make the next move, enough of the tension eased for the blue man to recognize the hero was actually trying to be respectful and not force his way in.  He knew they were going to have to talk it out eventually and stalling due to something as minor as being startled at how fast the confrontation was happening would only prolong the torment.  Megamind rubbed his neck and grumbled to himself for a moment before speaking again.

“We- we’ll go somewhere else.”

“In this weather?  You’ll be pretty miserable,” Metro Man said.

Megamind huffed.  “Not if I drive us in a heated vehicle.  Do you just _assume_ everyone wants you to carry them everywhere?”

“That is usually the case, yes,” he admitted.

“Well I very much **don’t** want you to carry me anywhere,” Megamind lectured.  “We will talk elsewhere, on neutral ground, and I am driving.  Take it or leave it.”

Metro Man almost answered.  Then he frowned and nodded.  “I’ll wait by the gate, then.  At least turn off the invisibility, okay?”  He flew off, presumably to hover just outside the warehouse grounds.

Megamind was beyond grateful that Metro Man had listened.  He had already figured out that inviting the territorial male into his private space deliberately was probably the equivalent to inviting him to stay for breakfast, and bring his toothbrush along too.  That wasn’t happening.  While Megamind was willing to let the brute at least attempt to reach an acceptable compromise that would help them come to terms it still rankled him that, should they succeed forming a relationship in the future, some _vapid twits_ would regard it as an inevitability and not a choice.

Megamind continued to grumble and took his sweet time getting ready to go out in what he was well aware was weather almost as evil as he was, hoping the whole time that Metro Man was looking in and listening to the foul things he was saying.


End file.
